ASUS P5N-E SLI - What You Get

What you get

You get nothing less or more than you would think would come with a motherboard. We have IDE and SATA cables, an I/O plate, drivers, a user guide, and an SLI connector. What you’re looking for is the board, so let’s take a closer look at that.

It’s a little cluttered by the CPU. I thought I would be okay with my coolers but I had problems with them. First I tried my Thermaltake big typhoon, and this didn’t go well. I was unable to mount it because of capacitors being too close to the socket. Next I tried my new Scythe Ninja; this worked but not perfectly. This cooler is huge; it takes up a lot of room, and room isn’t something this motherboard has to offer. With the fan mounted on the side closest to the memory, it made the first memory slot unusable.

As we move to the memory slots, we find 4 slots for DDR2 memory. We also find the main ATX connector.

As we move down we find the southbridge. We get 4 SATA and 2 IDE connectors. Yes I said 2, thank you ASUS for realizing that most people have IDE DVD burners and that IDE hard drives are still very much alive.

Here we find two 16x PCI-Express slots, dual 8x in SLI, 2 PCI and 1 1x PCI-Express slots. For SLI, we go back to the old-fashioned SLI select card. This takes me back to the original SLI days.

Under this aluminum heatsink is the chipset. The cooler extends past the chipset and doesn’t feel like it’s attached all that well; I can wiggle it by touching it.

On the back we find the usual stuff. We still have a parallel port. I think printers with this died a long time ago. There’s actually a firewire port back here, which is rare. We have an eSATA port back here too. The only other thing worth noting is the lacking audio integrated. It doesn’t support 5.1 or HD like many other boards.

This board has the nVidia 650i SLI chipset. This is the mainstream middle of the road chipset from nVidia. It has many features, but falls short of its older brother the 680i. As the name suggests it supports SLI. You are limited to 8x bandwidth though. This shouldn’t be a real problem for most people. There is enough bandwidth in 8x speed to not cause a bottleneck.

If you want full 16x bandwidth for each card and more SATA and USB ports, look into the 680i chipsets. Asus is known for their high end motherboards that cost close to $400. For those of us that don’t have that kind of money for a single motherboard, this motherboard fills that gap. With the 650i chipset you can get great performance for roughly $120, which is very good bang for the buck.

This board features ASUS’s Q-connector. You can attach the case wires to this and then put this to the connectors on the motherboard. I found it easier to use this, but I didn’t find the old school way that much harder.

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