Please explain the Sept. '11 $1k mobo choice

[grody]

I am really surprised to see a p67 mATX board at $150 to be so favorably considered (both from Tom's Hardware editors and Newegg customers) when a $150 z68 atx board with 2x the features is available. Aside from the obvious fact that certain builds require mATX, what does the EVGA board bring to the table that I am missing? I feel like everyone else knows but me

 

[nordlead]

I wouldn't have gone with the EVGA. It doesn't even have heatspreaders on the voltage regulators yet they want to overclock the CPU. You don't always need them, but sometimes they are, as shown by their $2k build.

Unfortunately, we could not get the system to run reliably at 1.38 V. It behaved as though it was overheating, even though CPU temperatures remained well below the Sandy Bridge architecture’s high thermal threshold.

We can only guess that it was the voltage regulator that was overheating, and that makes sense because only half of its MOSFETs were covered with a heat sink.

Reading the $1k article it seemed like they just wanted to mix it up rather than improve on the previous build. They did say that the board was the most affordable at the time, but now it isn't so much. Granted, I don't think you can get much of an improvement in performance over 3 months if there really aren't any new parts released in that time span.