A review: ASUS P5N32-E SLI.

Hey guys,

This is quite a surprise purchase for me too. First, because I had vowed not to buy another ASUS after having the P5B-Deluxe motherboard (with the dreaded 4:5 bug) for a couple of months. Then having a so-called "premium" motherboard (the ASUS P5W DH) which did not have any fine tuning options what so ever to optimize your ram setting. But here I am again, a proud owner of "P5N32-E SLI."

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The board retails for around Rs 13,500/- usually (thats excluding VAT for those in doubt) and carries the usual 3 year warranty from RP TECH (Rashi.) But investing in another ASUS seemed like a natural decision. Atleast you know your board (even if buggy as hell) will keep receiving bios updates for atleast another year or so (point in case, BIOS 2001 recently released for the P5W DH.... it started of with bios 0301 or something IIRC.)

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As you can see, this board was imported recently, 24th Feb '07 to be precise. And if my hunch is correct, ASUS has silently released a newer revision of the board into the midst. Have a look at the the serial # of my motherboard, and of one which was purchased January 1st week.

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Besides the usual progression of serial numbers, you will notice a couple of other differences. The first 2 digits have progressed from 71 to 72 and instead of "MCAG" we have a "MCAI." The other changes in the labels could just be cosmetic but i believe the change from 71MCAG to 72MCAI hints at a new revision. Read on for more actual evidence.

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As usual the statutory warning. This will save ASUS quite a few RMAs of people not being able to run their ram at certain dividers. Evidently, not all dividers available from the board are strong (geek talk decrypted, unstable!) across all bioses. More on this later.

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A couple more pics to satisfy the eager. I must say, the packaging is really impressive. Loads better than the P5B Deluxe/Normal but slightly inferior than the "premium" P5W DH.

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As always, ASUS wont disappoint you with the accessories. The sound card on a different daughter card is also a welcome change. Actually its very shrewd of ASUS. They have made the card slightly incompatible with normal PCI-e specs (physical dimensions) so this card wont fit on another board having a PCI-e 1x connector.

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Plenty of SATA cables to go around (counted to be 4, 2 straight ones and 2 with one edge bent at 90 degrees for easy insertion.)

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The flexi SLI connector. Not that I plan to go SLI any time soon (I bought the board more for the parameters afforded by the bios, not the 2x 16x slots) but nice to have a well implemented bridge. Increases resale value :)

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The board in all its glory. Still a virgin though. She never saw what was coming her way :bounce: I must again comment on the build quality. Holding the board gives you confidence on its stability (boy can that be mis leading.... ever held a Gigabyte DQ6 :P) The heat pipes "look" good but are flimsily designed. And the sinks are definitely not copper, but more like aluminum painted over.

But thank god ASUS for not putting a big shinny sticker over and around the NB sink. Was a PITA to remove them as they really impeded the airflow and thus reduced their effectiveness further more.

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A close up of the stock BIOS sticker. "0602"

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No more ugly caps around the CPU area. A benchers dream. And now finally I can use the Tuniq the way it is supposed to be used.

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Because of the caps present around the CPU socket in both the P5B Deluxe and the P5W DH, I could not use the Tuniq with the fan facing up (as per their manual) because the large base of the CPU block was interfering with the caps.

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The SATA ports in all their glory. A nice design decision by ASUS as the SATA cables no longer interfere with the other cables in the same area (fan connectors, power switch connector, etc.) PLUS, it just gives a more elegant feel to the board.

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My biggest gripe with the board's physical design. Why place the RAM slots, the sole IDE port (which many people still use for their optical drives) and the 24 pin power connector side-by-side? You cannot remove one without having to fiddle with another. And if you have some sort of contraption (or if you are l33t, one of the recently released RAM coolers :)) for cooling your RAM, god help you. With all three plugged in, trust me, its a pain to operate in that area.

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More proof of the fact that Striker is just a pimped up P5N32-E SLI. A few missing caps, couple of switches and the debug console, and you have your very own Striker Extreme :) [E]xtremely cool huh? :P

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The IO panel looks kind of naked huh? Thanks to ASUS for doing a really good strip job.

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The venerable ITE chip. I dont remember the last ASUS board which came without one.

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Time to do some inspection (and then some cleaning) of the goo they put under the pseudo-copper sinks. Popping them sinks-cum-pipes was never so easy.

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Off you go mate.

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Nirvana :)

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The aforementioned goo. But I must say, the contact was better than I had suspected. With the P5B Deluxe, hardly 20% of the core was contacting the sink. But for all the cash we pay for these boards, they could at least put in some good TIM (Thermal Interface Material.)

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As you can see, the "goo" had totally dried up. I wonder what kind of contact the core was making with the sink. The good thing I will never find out.... replaced the goo with ass (ok thats geek talk again, AS5 = Arctic Silver 5 from Arctic Cooling) before first boot.

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The NB was no better. Similar goo and similar "bad" contact. When will these motherboard manufacturers learn!!!!

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As FreeCableGuy (of TheTechRepository) would say, go crazy with the swabs :) Could not find a more convenient and accessible cleaning tool. And it does the job pretty darn well. (Pardon the quality of the pics folks, there is so detail a puny K750i :P can capture.)

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The sinks free of the sludge.

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AS5 applied on both the cores. I have found after many tries that this is the most optimal way of mounting the blocks on the bare chips. Put a small grain of AS5 smack in the center of the core and spread it thin using a stretched out poly-bag across your index finger.

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The Tuniq on the P5W DH (due to the aforementioned problem) and the way it was mounted on the P5N32-E SLI motherboard (shown below.)

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First boot yey! Good wow factor ASUS, hats off to you.

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I didnt have much time to mess around with the stock bios (which had proven issues supporting the Creative XFi and had massive Vcore holes accross the FSB range.)

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Utilizing the built in EZFlash utility to flash the bios. Very convinient indeed. No more USB boots and floppy hassles.

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Straight onto bios 0902. It is supposed to fix the XFi issues as well as the Vcore holes.

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Hell yea!

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Lets get clocking. I took care of all the mundane basic settings and then started on the most interesting part of the bios "Extreme Tweaker."

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There are 4 settings available. PCIEX16_1, PCIEX16_2 and PCIEX16_3. The odd man out is the SPP<->MCP Ref Clock.

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Nice range available and most of is usable (sensibly i.e.) But whether on not increasing the PCIe has any tangible improvement on scores/benchmarks.

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Woot!! 500 Mhz with default being 200 Mhz. God knows how much is usable. Generally people leave this alone (and the LDT multiplier.) I guess this is related to the HT link being used between the MCP and the SPP (North bridge and the South bridge for the un-initiated.)

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Ah Nirvana :) Unlinked.... the prize feature of the 680i. Now you can adjust your RAM independently of your CPU and not have to worry finding your sweet 24x7 RAM : CPU ratio. Or can you? The reality is, the Unlinked mode is not truely "asynchronous." What nVidia has smarly done is implement a lot of in between multipliers (in between the standard intel ones of 1:1, 4:5, 3:4, 2:3, 1:2 etc.) So now when you dial in your settings, it snaps onto to the closest multiplier and thus gives the closest RAM speed possible.

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The other mode of RAM clocking available.

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BTW, when you select Linked and then 1:1 believing that you are now in familiar Intel 1:1 waters, you are very mistaken. Then 1:1 is with the Quad pumped FSB, not with the base FSB. So with Linked 1:1, you are actually trying to run your ram at 800Mhz (i.e. DDR2 1600Mhz :P) A impossible feat, let me tell you.

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Coming into the overclocking section... we see that the option to change the CPU multiplier is pretty prominent. No more obfuscated 3-level deep menus just to change the damn multiplier.

The other sub menus speak for them shelves. The memory timings setting is shown below:

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The max values permitted by tRRD, tRC, tWR, tWTR, tREF, tRD, tRFC and Async Latency are already selected.

Whats amazing is that the 680i chipset allows you to really "REALLY" run the ram at tight timings (you will find out about this momentarily) or at a very lax mode. I mean tRFC selectable upto 127 is not something to look past by. Maybe this is the reason that the memory seems to fly when you select the 2T mode. The RAM is being run at such a high latency that the tight primary timings (say 4-3-3-10 at 2.25V at 520Mhz on normal bin D9GKX) do not really make any difference.

tCL

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tCL is selectable all the way down to 1. Brings back the memories of good old BH-5. But has any one actually gotten DDR2 to work at tCL < 3 :nut:

tRCD

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Again all the way down to 1. Hot stuff :)

tRP

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tRAS

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The tRAS range makes more sense (because we have seen selectable low ranges in other motherboards also) but the max tRAS is again out of the world. I wonder how the ram will fly with all the settings relaxed as far as possible.

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1T vs 2T

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Till now we were stuck with 2T without a choice. The intel chipsets (most importantly 965 variants and 975x) defaulted to 2T mode but did a preety good job at that.

nVidia, wanting to close the gap between Intel's fast default implementation and a relatively slower 2T mode of nVidia, introduced a user selectable 1T mode.

And the difference is preety huge, as seen here: http://forums.erodov.com/showthread.php?t=29

Over Voltage

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The bios allows you to select a plethora of voltages. Much more flexible than just vCore, vDimm and vNB. Now you can dial in the settings which exactly match your requirements.

Max and Min: vCore

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Max and Min: vDimm

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With a max vCore (selectable) of 1.9V and a max vDimm of 3.425V (again selectable), you can basically fry your hardware out of the box. And mind you, the board (atleast with the current set of release bioses) tends to overvolt everything except the vCore like a :banana::banana::banana::banana::banana:. So a user set 2.3V in bios is actually anywhere between 2.35-2.37V in reality.

1.2V HT Voltage

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NB Core Voltage

http://forums.erodov.com/imagehostin...683d625299.jpg

SB Core Voltage

http://forums.erodov.com/imagehostin...683fdb59b5.jpg

CPU VTT Voltage

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Finally something unique. Normally other motherboards used to bundle this along with FSB Termination voltage. Now you can safely max this out (there are rumors that VTT set to > 1.51V causes instability) without worrying about pushing the FSB termination voltage too high. This doesnt affect the temperatures appreciably and allows us to achieve those crazy high FSBs.

DDRII Controller Ref Voltage

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Finally something DFI like. Most of the normals will leave this setting at auto till some Guru comes along and demystifies this setting and its effect on over clocks.

Couple of other RAM controller related voltages:

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Onboard Device Configuration

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The usual shebang. HD Audio (with questionable audio quality), 2 on board G bit lans and a fire wire controller. Nothing fancy.

ASUS OC Profile

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For being able to quickly go back to different known settings without having to set each and everything. I must say its a pretty handy utility.

Conclusion

Such a handy feature rich motherboard at this price point is a steal deal i must say.

Nice review KiD0M4N !

Anyone try to OC on it yet? [pls share yours.]
I just play around a few hours and get above 480 FSB a little bit, seem not good mobo to push max FSB.

PS: If you look near the PCIE_2 slot at the Label "P5N32E-SLI" this mobo is the same PCB as striker , just minor chage for lower the cost.

490FSB here, maybe more if I drop the multi again.

HT Voltage isnt making a difference for me.

tRRD and Async latency are dead timings IMHO ie...you can change them in BIOS and it shows in Memset...but the RAM isnt being told to change anything.

Seem to have FSB issues between 420 and..460 ishhh? Not tested full extent of the "hole" but its annoying

mine is limited to about 489 benchable.

500 is a no go. i can boot windows but not bench.

max with unlinked i got was around 625-630 cas 5

Which bios are you guys using now a days? I have been out of home for almost 20 days now... hence when I go back (in another 15 or so days) I want to start off good.

Regards.