Asus P5N-E SLI small review

[couppi]

I got my P5N-e SLI in the mail today. It's based on the 650i chipset and retails for $129.



It comes with Asus's usual bundle of 2 sata and ide cables, SLI bridge, manual and other assorted goods. Naturally, the board layout is horrible.



I fired it up with my Xeon 3050 on a Scythe Infinity and started exploring the BIOS. RAM voltage only goes to 2.5 volts, but the board's other ram settings match those of 680i boards. NB voltage goes up to around 1.75v and vCore goes up to 1.6v. FSB goes up to 750mhz.



One of the plastic tabs on my Infinity broke, so my temps were hovering at 70C. I decided to go for broke and set the FSB to 500mhz. Surprisingly, it posted fine. I'm going to try FCG's method for mounting the Infinity with screws tomorrow and see how stable the board is.

UPDATE

I put together my p5b-deluxe and did a few benches.

Specs:
Xeon 3050 at 3.7ghz
P5B Deluxe or P5N-E SLI
Team Xtreem 2gb 462mhz 4-4-4-12
x1900XTX stock

SuperPi:
1m

P5B Deluxe: 15.890s


P5N-E SLI: 16.140s


32M
P5B Deluxe: 14m 50.828s
P5N-E SLI: 15m 10.812s

3dmark
3dmark 2001 SE
P5B Deluxe: 46732
P5N-E SLI: 47096

3dmark 2003
P5B Deluxe: 21500
P5N-E SLI: 21779

3dmark 2005
P5B Deluxe: 12989
P5N-E SLI: 13024

3dmark 2006
P5B Deluxe: 6741
P5N-E SLI: 6754

Sandra
Dhrystone
P5B Deluxe: 34551 MIPS
P5N-E SLI: 34339 MIPS

Whetstone
P5B Deluxe: 23498 MFLOPS
P5N-E SLI: 23508 MFLOPS

Bandwidth Int
P5B Deluxe: 7757 MB/s
P5N-E SLI: 7994 MB/s

Bandwidth Float
P5B Deluxe: 7742 MB/s
P5N-E SLI: 8083 MB/s

Memory Latency
P5B Deluxe: 74 ns
P5N-E SLI: 70 ns

It looks like 650i is just slightly faster than p965 in 3D, while p965 is slightly faster in pi.

[Leon2ky]

It looks like a pretty sweet budget board.

[Asky]

Yeh looks good......hopefully it doesnt have the 680i bugs.

[Trice]

A lot of people thought the FSB was limited to 412, obviously not the case. I got mine today too, should be done tonight (if Im not tired enough to do the watercooling up in time)

[Ron 61]

Thanks, any info you can give is much appreciated as I have my finger on the trigger for this board.

[zert]

Thanks for posting man
i'm really eagerly waiting to see what these boards can do, so don't keep me waiting
keep those results coming

[shimmishim]

any o/c results yet?

[Cooper]

Wonder if memory can be clocked lower than FSB

[don_vercetti]

500 fsb? Sweet. Looking forward to results, if the RD600 is too limited release, and the 680i doesn't drop in price real fast, this could be my next chipset.

[Trice]

I got mine together, just going to head out to get some distilled water and fire this slut up.

[zert]

Trice get your results

could any of you measure the Vdroop on these boards plz.

[oijkue]

$129 ..... not bad price
BIOS screen looks different form another ASUS mobo...

[Trice]

Trice get your results

could any of you measure the Vdroop on these boards plz.

Filling the water up now.

[Lestat]

yeah trice i forgot to mention last night be sure to measure vdroop on this thing. if asus follows suit with all their other Under $250 boards the vdroop is going to be pretty massive.
more predominant on the sub 200 boards though.
i truly hope they are gunna stop with the droop but i doubt it, asus has had the worst vdroop in the business for as long as i can remember and even some of their top teir boards had it too. ie; P5WD2E-Prem. 0.07v droop.

also EXTRMELY disappointed they did not even add a heatsink to the southbridge, its the same 590 southbridge the 680i boards use.

i would suggest you get a heatsink on there ASAP. the Twinkle Star might even fit on there, but i cant see the holes to tell for sure. (but the 680i the holes were pretty close so.. may have to find something else, but it does really need a heatsink.
i would also advise you to slap a 50mm fan on that NB, once again, stupid, stupid, stupid thing they are doing by using passive heatsink. you see how large that heatsink is? the chip underneath it is only about 1cm large, so. that gives you an idea that they KNEW that chip gets super hot so they went with a large heatsink to try and dissapate more heat.
get a fan...

[couppi]

yeah trice i forgot to mention last night be sure to measure vdroop on this thing. if asus follows suit with all their other Under $250 boards the vdroop is going to be pretty massive.
more predominant on the sub 200 boards though.
i truly hope they are gunna stop with the droop but i doubt it, asus has had the worst vdroop in the business for as long as i can remember and even some of their top teir boards had it too. ie; P5WD2E-Prem. 0.07v droop.

also EXTRMELY disappointed they did not even add a heatsink to the southbridge, its the same 590 southbridge the 680i boards use.

i would suggest you get a heatsink on there ASAP. the Twinkle Star might even fit on there, but i cant see the holes to tell for sure. (but the 680i the holes were pretty close so.. may have to find something else, but it does really need a heatsink.
i would also advise you to slap a 50mm fan on that NB, once again, stupid, stupid, stupid thing they are doing by using passive heatsink. you see how large that heatsink is? the chip underneath it is only about 1cm large, so. that gives you an idea that they KNEW that chip gets super hot so they went with a large heatsink to try and dissapate more heat.
get a fan...

Vdroop is pretty bad. I don't have a DMM to measure with, so I have to rely on bios readings. If I set 1.6v vcore in bios, the hardware monitor reads 1.48v . The board has an option to add +100mv to the vcore, however. With that enabled, bios reads 1.57v.

The southbridge is a 430i chip. It gets pretty warm to the touch, but probably doesn't need a heatsink. Sinking it might be worth a few extra mhz, though.

The thing that really pisses me off about this board is the fact that you have to make your own raid driver floppy. It's a huge pain for something that would have cost Asus $1 to include.

[pippo369]

Hi, what's the Max Vcore in bios for this mother?

[Trice]

1.6

I had some leake issues that I had to fix on the GPU block. Should be up in a few min, to install XP.

[couppi]

And the max fsb is...

503.

http://valid.x86-secret.com/show_oc?id=147192

It ran orthos for 15 minutes just fine. I think this is a wall on my cpu, not on the board. The board is completely stable with just 1.4v on the northbridge. Going up to 1.76v does nothing. It'll be interesting to see Trice's results.

[don_vercetti]

Not bad, for 129$. Have you got any Core 2 Duo to try it on, not Xeon?

[zert]

503
thats damn nice

[Cooper]

couppi

can you please make photo of ram dividers settings in BIOS - i`d like to know if I could use some cheapo 533MHz sticks but not be limited on cpu OC.

PS. nevermind that. I see on that validation that your ram is running @ 395 with 14:11. That`s all I`d really wanted to know

Are there any problems with raid ?

[Ron 61]

I ordered one ( Asus P5N-E SLI)from zipzoom and I have a xeon 3060 to drop in it but I'm unsure of what memory to buy. I would like to get either Team 2 Gb Kit DDR2 (2x 1Gb) 4-4-4-10 800Mhz or G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) F2-6400PHU2-2GBHZ. Can anybody tell me if this memory will play nice with this board?

[couppi]

I ordered one ( Asus P5N-E SLI)from zipzoom and I have a xeon 3060 to drop in it but I'm unsure of what memory to buy. I would like to get either Team 2 Gb Kit DDR2 (2x 1Gb) 4-4-4-10 800Mhz or G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) F2-6400PHU2-2GBHZ. Can anybody tell me if this memory will play nice with this board?

I'm using the Team Xtreem stuff right now and it clocks horrible. It can't do 400mhz CL4 1T stable and can only do 500mhz 2T at CL5 with 2.5v. I'm going to return these sticks and try the Gskill 2GBHZ.

I'll grab a P5b-dlx and a floppy tomorrow and test performance and raid.

The NF6 only clockgen works great. I can move the fsb downward just fine, but I get a hard freeze at 507mhz

[[XC] hipno650]

if it can oc to 500fsb i will take a hard look at it for a e4300 cuz if it could hit 3.2ghz stable with the e4300 and some mushkin em667 i would pick one up for a wcg cruncher and secondary gaming rig. nice results guys!!!

[Ron 61]

Thanks couppi, any info you can post is much appreciated. Looks like maybe I need to get the G skill but doesn't the g skill and team both have micron D9GMH? Why would one be better than the other?