The Board - Layout

The board follows the same black and yellow color theme we have already seen with current upper-mainstream offerings from Foxconn. The mainboard is of full width and there is quite some unused space on the PCB. Turning the board over, there are no big surprises here. While some manufacturers do have one or two ICs located on the underside, Foxconn has avoided that. Taking a quick look at the external connectivity, we have 4x USB 2.0, 2x USB 3.0, PS2 Keyboard, optical out, multi-channel audio along with a Gigabit Ethernet connector.


Moving closer, the CPU area of the P67A-S is very clean, but the large heatsink to the left may cause some problems with certain tower CPU coolers. A metal backplate - part of the CPU socket, reinforces the board in this area, so you should be fine even if the cooler exerts a lot of pressure.


The memory slots are rather close to the CPU socket, but normal tower coolers should not get in the way of these DIMM slots. Each of them is colored differently so that you can easily install your memory into the right ones for a dual-channel configuration. It seems there is a single power phase set aside for the memory. The expansion slots are of yellow and black color as well and you may run two cards in CrossFire or SLI if you wish. Three PCIe x1 and two traditional PCI slots round up the expandability options in this area.


Foxconn has kept things rather simple with the heatsinks. A small square Aluminum one has been placed on the P67 Southbridge, without any heatpipes or anything fancy extruding from this area. You will also find dedicated power and reset button directly on the board along with a color coded pin array to connect the case controls and LED to the board.