Asus P5N32-E SLI

Manufacturer:	Asus
Price:	£149.21 inc VAT
Reviewer:	Chris Lee
Review Date:	Mar 2007
Speed	41/45	91%
Features	27/30	90%
Value	17/25	68%
Overall	85%

Verdict: The Striker Extreme, without the fancy bits.

Paying a little extra money for top-quality equipment is part of what being a PC enthusiast is all about. However, there are limits to this, and the Asus Striker Extreme was over the line. We gave it a CPC 'Crazy But Cool' award, as its performance couldn't be denied, but we couldn't help feeling that it failed to justify its enormous £250 price tag.

Costing 'just' £150, the new Asus nForce 680i SLI board, the P5N32-E SLI, isn't exactly what we'd call a budget motherboard, but it costs £100 less than the Striker, and is cheaper than the ECS and BFG nForce 680i SLI boards. Even better, while the P5N32-E SLI doesn't have all the extras of the Striker, in terms of core specification, the two boards are essentially the same.

Like the Striker, the P5N32-E SLI offers support for every Intel LGA775 CPU, from the scrawny Celeron D up to the mighty quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX6700. The P5N32-E SLI, as its name suggests, is compatible with both SLI graphics cards and SLI memory. It also boasts very good audio; as with the Striker, the separate 'SupremeFX' daughterboard contains the ADI 1988B sound chip, which is compatible with 8-channel HD audio, and also capable of encoding audio into 24-bit DTS surround sound. What's more, the board's back panel offers both coaxial and optical S/PDIF outputs, which is better than what you get with Creative's Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Music.

If you place the Striker and the P5N32-E SLI next to each other, you'll immediately see that the boards are based on the same PCB. On the cheaper board, the power and reset switches are missing, as is the small Silicon Image chip that controls the Striker's eSATA ports. The heatpipe cooling for the chipsets is also simpler on the P5N32-E SLI.

The P5N32-E SLI offers excellent overclocking options in the BIOS. Voltage-wise, the BIOS of the P5N32-E SLI is remarkably similar to that of the Striker; the FSB adjustment range is identical, as is the ability to overvolt the CPU to 1.9V, the RAM to 3.425V, the Northbridge to 2.75V and the Southbridge to 1.85V. The Hyper-Transport can only go to 1.45V, compared to the Striker's 1.95V, and, although it can overvolt the memory, the P5N32-E SLI lacks the ability to overvolt the DDR2 controller. However, these are both extremely minor gripes.

When it comes to overclocking, you can opt to use SLI memory if you have compatible DIMMs; this offers simpler but more limited overclocking ability than tweaking the BIOS settings yourself. If you want to get your hands dirty then the board performs very well. With a little extra voltage to the Northbridge and CPU, we easily managed to ramp up our test CPU, a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo E6700, to 3.6GHz, which we've discovered to be its maximum stable speed when using air cooling. When we dropped the CPU multiplier to its minimum, we were able to ramp up the board's FSB all the way to 487.5MHz (1950MHz effective). This is just 12.5MHz short of the Striker Extreme's FSB, and equals the FSB of the Labs-winning Asus P5B Deluxe WiFi-AP.

Overclocking wasn't without its minor niggles though. While the box cheerfully boasts of the benefits of Nvidia's QuickSync technology, when we activated this feature in the BIOS, it reduced the speed of our 800MHz Corsair test memory to just 533MHz. Oddly, this didn't happen when we used the same feature on the Striker. Using the standard 'unlinked FSB/RAM' setting, we managed to max out both the CPU and RAM, which resulted in excellent benchmark scores that equalled those of the ECS and BFG.

CONCLUSION

All the nForce 680i SLI motherboards we've seen have been overpriced, and have failed to outperform good Intel P965-based boards. The P5N32-E SLI makes the best attempt at balancing the cost and features, so it's the best nForce 6-series motherboard we've seen. It's pricier than P965-based P5B Deluxe WiFi-AP, but not by much. If you must have SLI then the P5N32-E SLI is the board you should choose, as it's cheaper, and a better overclocker, than both the ECS and BFG boards.