Asus P5N32-SLI Deluxe

[FUGGER]

Round three:

The motherboard arrived today with a pair of 7800's in a white box. The cards have a stock nvidia heat sink, not the monster like on the 512.

I notice there is a bit more spacing between PCIE slots and the NB cooling was upgraded a little in quality with the heat pipe.

Setting up now, images inbound.

Ill test SLI on P5WD2 again with newest bios first.

[Nasgul]

Alright!

How long till you kill that one?




I'll give it 1 more extra day than the Gigabyte.

[calcal]

7800gtx 512 or 7800gtx 256?

[FUGGER]

256, I have not pulled the sinks yet.

[Supertim0r]

is it 8 phase like the A8N32 ?

[Xassius]

Hope overclocking isn't so shoddy as was on the original nVidia Intel board. And yes, 8-phase power now instead of the crippled 3-phase on the original nVidia Intel Asus board.

[IluvIntel]

This will be very interesting to see...

[meke]

SLI @ Intel?


Edit: I am concentrated on 955 & 975 chipset, totally forgot this topic is about Nf4@ intel.

[FUGGER]

8 phase power yes

No BSEL mob, stuck on stupid. no sign of life at 266FSB

Improved boot time yet scrambled HD pushing 800Mhz from 1Ghz memory...

Pentium D 820 works no problem, runs very cool 38c

[Kadaj]

is it 8 phase like the A8N32 ?

it should be, I believe it was 8phase power systems ( or those able to handle 81A ) that begin to conform to VRM 9.1 specification, the only boards that conform to that are the gigabyte boards that have those DPS add-in cards. VRM 9.1 is the recommended minnimun for LGA775 processors.

[LarsK]

Cool FUGGER. I just set mine up with my P4 670. As "usual" I can't get the chipset to run high fsb with the 800 Mhz fsb chip, even with cpu lockfree.

But I'm at 5102 Mhz, 268 Mhz fsb stable, with a pair of 7800GTX's X-Fi soundcard and TVtuner card (both pci cards) on stock motherboard cooling. CPU is still fairly cool in my Mach II GT. With stock volts on the chipset I hit a wall around 264 Mhz fsb on the default 19x multi on the P4 670.

CPUz validated link here http://valid.x86-secret.com/show_oc?id=52175

Because I'm primarily testing stability atm and not really doing any benching other than testing performance clock for clock to monitor changes with different settings, I don't have any awesome benches. 3dmark03 is around 32k with default clocked Gainward 7800GTX's, 05 is almost 12k (still stinks on Intel Nforce compared to AMD nforce 4), but most importantly my FEAR performance has almost litterally doubled @ 1600x1200 2xaa 8xaf compared to my P5WD2 with a single 7800GTX. So I actually think I'm keeping this card for the winter. So far I have had zero stability issues, even with a fully stocked system

A 3dmark03 link, never mind the score, nor the wrong fsb reading, this was merely part of a stability test http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k3=4420045 I'm sure FUGGER will blast my scores to Kingsom come pretty soon anyway....

[FUGGER]

Straight up stock score

7800 GT - Same card as GS except GT has 25Mhz faster core.

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm05=1472738

[FUGGER]

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm05=1472968

It claims SLI is enabled. This is like a single card score? I am not using LOD and have performance settings.

[Nanometer]

Straight up stock score

7800 GT - Same card as GS except GT has 25Mhz faster core.

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm05=1472738

And 16 pipes for the GS and 20 pipes for the GT.

[LarsK]

Here's my best so far @ 3dmark05 with 2x 7800GTX in SLI. It seems to be extremely CPU bound in SLI. http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm05=1471040

[mike]

Just 263mhz here - too bad the board looked really interesting at first...
Cpus ( 8x0s and 6x0s ) run much cooler - but my max mem clocks appear to be down at first glance

[FUGGER]

I put it back in the box...

[LarsK]

The board is not easy to play with. For som reason it seems to need to be "warmed up", it won't cold boot at 260+ Mh fsb, and attempting to run 3d apps within the first 5 mins after boot results in a black screen. After a few rebots and some warming up, i can easily prime and 3d bench up to around 268 Mhz fsb. I can boot upto at least 270 Mhz fsb, but the system is rather flaky here. Here's a superpi 1M @ 270 Mhz fsb: http://www.hardware-test.dk/oc/bille...id=7913&pic=12

Also finally broke 12k in 05 here: http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm05=1478634

[mike]

I put it back in the box...

I should have too, and saved me some headaches...flashed the latest bios now it wont post anymore after the flash. Wasn't a even bad flash or a flash that got uninterrupted - just won't post after a supposed successful flash.

...well now it's going in the box for sure...

The ram clocks were way down too - too bad - was so promising seeing the low temps on the CPU. Great oard for stock but sad for overclocking

Here's a superpi 1M @ 270 Mhz fsb: http://www.hardware-test.dk/oc/bille...id=7913&pic=12

Also finally broke 12k in 05 here: http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm05=1478634

Nice clocks considering the voltage!! Man if the FSB would be going up it would be something...

[LarsK]

I should have too, and saved me some headaches...flashed the latest bios now it wont post anymore after the flash. Wasn't a even bad flash or a flash that got uninterrupted - just won't post after a supposed successful flash.

...well now it's going in the box for sure...

The ram clocks were way down too - too bad - was so promising seeing the low temps on the CPU. Great oard for stock but sad for overclocking

That's because the latest bios (ver 0209) really isn't for the P5N32-SLI but for the P5ND2-SLI.... Asus has put the bios in the wrong directory it seems. A lot of people on Asus own so-called VIP forum are reporting dead boards because of it. A couple of threads on that on their forum.

Nice clocks considering the voltage!! Man if the FSB would be going up it would be something...

Yeah, it's a bummer. With my P5WD2 the same cpu was completely stable up to at least 370 Mhz fsb and ~5.2 Ghz. The SLI setup could really use the memory bandwidth.

The board is still very flaky I think. One day it'll boot just fine at 268 Mhz fsb, the next it won't even at 260...... Sometimes it's stable all day, and other days the screen just goes black...... Actually though, I believe it could very well be driver related, be that chipset or videodrivers (or both....)

What we really need is a good Intel 975 chipset motherboard with SLI support. But we've pretty much all known that for a while...

[mike]

That's because the latest bios (ver 0209) really isn't for the P5N32-SLI but for the P5ND2-SLI.... Asus has put the bios in the wrong directory it seems. A lot of people on Asus own so-called VIP forum are reporting dead boards because of it. A couple of threads on that on their forum.

LOL! Guess that solves the mystery

[Supertim0r]

nothing happen or it still "boot" with no image ?

[mike]

still boot with no image - but drives etc. do not start booting - no chance to blind flash the board

[banias_bao]

how about it's oc?

[LarsK]

how about it's oc?

It's not a great overclocker, like the P5WD2. But it does overclock. The Nforce 4 Intel boards all seem to have a real problem running 800 Mhz fsb chips at high fsb's though, so if high fsb is what you're looking at you'll need an 1066 Mhz fsb chip to start with.

After almost a week of testing, tweaking and fiddling my P4 670 has settled @ 266(1066) Mhz fsb/5067 Mhz. Not nearly as impressive an overclock as on the P5WD2, but still a lot better than I did on the Abit NI8 and Asus P5ND2.

CPU Vcore is very low, setting it @ 1.700V in bios (max) results in an idle Vcore of ~1.62V and ~1.57V under load. This may well be one of the reasons I can't get the cpu above 270 Mhz fsb, and can't get 3d stable beyond 268 Mhz fsb.

I just reinstalled everything on 2x 74GB Raptors today instead of my old Maxtor IDE drive, and it certainly has improved HD performance quite a bit. Even 3dmarks have gone up a notch as well, although not much. I did the install at 5067 Mhz, and the system has been running for ~5 hours now without issue. Also last night I tested prime for about 30 mins and it was prime stable at 5067 for the 30 mins. Also it is error free in memtest86 through several passes. This is with 4x 512MB Corsair PC5400UL's @ DDR2-710 cas 3-2-2-8-8 1T all memory optimizations enabled.

NV Raid seems to be working fine, in HD Tach I get a burst speed of 226.8 MB/s, a sustained transferrate of 128.1 MB/s, accesstime of 8.0 ms and cpu util is 4%.