All P67 Sandy Bridge motherboards will be benchmarked against each other using the Intel Core i5 2500K. The maximum overclock will also be included within the proceding benchmark tests to identify performance gains as a result of tweaking CPU clock speed via the multiplier.

Overclocking

As previously mentioned in our Intel Core i5 Sandy Bridge Roundup - overclocking is achieved by altering the multiplier rather than the BCLK. So the BCLK stays at 100MHz and the multiplier is modified. So if we have 100MHz on the BCLK and 40 for the multiplier this will obviously output 4GHz. We chose to use the Intel Core i5 2500K across each of the motherboard tests and indeed for the overclocking due to its unlocked multiplier. Since the P8P67 is a mainstream board and the CPU is also mainstream this is probably going to be a popular combination (if the results are positive of course!)

With overclocking simplified on Sandy Bridge, this means that achieving the best overclock couldn't be easier. CPU voltage and multiplier just need to be modified accordingly. I began slowly nudging up the multiplier from 33 (3.3GHz). Ultimately I managed to overclock the 2500K by 1000MHz giving a clock-speed of 4.3GHz. Please bear in mind that at this stage many of the motherboards we have been using to test the chips are premature and some are even beta BIOS versions. So, whilst we did hit a wall with 4.3GHz this isn't the end of the road by any means.