ASUS P5N32-E SLI Plus: NVIDIA's 650i goes Dual x16
by Gary Key on April 2, 2007 3:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Board Layout and Features
Considering the amount of options on the board, we think ASUS devised a very good board layout, although a couple of areas are crowded. The board features an eight-phase power design and 100% use of conductive polymer aluminum capacitors that provided excellent stability during testing. The board also features a toned down version of the Striker Extreme passive cooling system and ASUS's patented Stack Cool 2 technology that is designed transfer heat away from the CPU area. During our overclocking tests we found the passive heat pipe cooling system worked well but required additional airflow across 650i SPP and VRM heatsinks to ensure stability with our Tuniq 120 air cooler.
There are eight fan headers (one 4-pin, seven 3-pin) located in easy to reach positions on the board. Only the CPU fan and four chassis fan headers offer automatic fan control capabilities within the BIOS. The automatic control system includes a choice of using temperature ranges or duty cycle speeds to control the selected fan headers while all fan headers are monitored by the BIOS. The board installed easily into our Cooler Master CM Stacker 830 case and cable management was very good for power, optical, and hard drives. We did find that a user could potentially disengage the SATA cables with very little pressure being applied to the cable, due to the motherboard's SATA connector design/location.
The memory slots are color coded correctly for dual channel operation. The 24-pin ATX power connector is conveniently located with the black floppy drive cable on the edge of the board. We would have switched the location of the blue IDE connector with the floppy drive connector and given it a right angle design to match the SATA ports. As it stands, this is one of the worst design decisions on the board as connecting an IDE cable after the power cable is attached is difficult once the board is installed in a case.
The six blue SATA ports are located on the edge of the board. We found the positioning of the SATA ports to be very good when utilizing the PCI or second blue PCI-E x16 physical slot. The MCP is passively cooled and remained warm to the touch throughout testing although additional cooling was not needed when overclocking.
The board comes with three PCI Express x16 connectors (two x16 and one x8 electrical), two PCI Express x1, and two PCI 2.2 connectors. The layout of this design offers a very good triple x16 connector design. The second PCI Express x1 slot will be physically unavailable as will the second PCI connector if you utilize SLI with double slot cards. The third x16 slot can be utilized for physics acceleration if this option ever arrives from NVIDIA, or it can be used as a normal PCI Express slot for a wide variety of cards up to x8 speeds.
Getting back to CPU socket area, we find a fair amount of room for alternative cooling solutions. We utilized the stock heatsink/fan in our normal testing but also verified a few larger Socket-775 air cooling solutions such as the Tuniq 120 would fit in this area during our overclocking tests. The 650i SPP chipset is passively cooled with a mid-rise heatsink unit that did not interfere with any installed peripherals but did run hot without additional airflow over it during overclocking. The VRM components are passively cooled and the 8-pin ATX power connector is located out of the way. We will start providing thermal results of the various cooling solutions in our next article.
The rear panel contains the standard PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, two LAN ports, and four USB 2.0 ports. The LAN (RJ-45) ports have two LED indicators representing Activity and Speed of the connection through the Marvell Gigabit PCI-E PHY controllers. The panel also has an S/PDIF optical out port, S/PDIF coaxial out port, and an IEEE 1394 port.
The audio subsystem is based on the ADI AD1988B and offers 8-channel output along with full DTS Connect support. The AD1988B chipset and output ports are located on a separate riser card that ASUS has dubbed the SupremeFX. While this audio solution will not offer supreme performance over the Creative X-FI series, it certainly offers better performance and audio quality than the Realtek solutions, especially when comparing EAX 2.0 audio quality.
Overall, the feature set on this board is very good and certainly better than the EVGA 680i LT SLI board we recently reviewed, with both boards retailing for a similar price.
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| Click to enlarge |
Considering the amount of options on the board, we think ASUS devised a very good board layout, although a couple of areas are crowded. The board features an eight-phase power design and 100% use of conductive polymer aluminum capacitors that provided excellent stability during testing. The board also features a toned down version of the Striker Extreme passive cooling system and ASUS's patented Stack Cool 2 technology that is designed transfer heat away from the CPU area. During our overclocking tests we found the passive heat pipe cooling system worked well but required additional airflow across 650i SPP and VRM heatsinks to ensure stability with our Tuniq 120 air cooler.
There are eight fan headers (one 4-pin, seven 3-pin) located in easy to reach positions on the board. Only the CPU fan and four chassis fan headers offer automatic fan control capabilities within the BIOS. The automatic control system includes a choice of using temperature ranges or duty cycle speeds to control the selected fan headers while all fan headers are monitored by the BIOS. The board installed easily into our Cooler Master CM Stacker 830 case and cable management was very good for power, optical, and hard drives. We did find that a user could potentially disengage the SATA cables with very little pressure being applied to the cable, due to the motherboard's SATA connector design/location.
The memory slots are color coded correctly for dual channel operation. The 24-pin ATX power connector is conveniently located with the black floppy drive cable on the edge of the board. We would have switched the location of the blue IDE connector with the floppy drive connector and given it a right angle design to match the SATA ports. As it stands, this is one of the worst design decisions on the board as connecting an IDE cable after the power cable is attached is difficult once the board is installed in a case.
The six blue SATA ports are located on the edge of the board. We found the positioning of the SATA ports to be very good when utilizing the PCI or second blue PCI-E x16 physical slot. The MCP is passively cooled and remained warm to the touch throughout testing although additional cooling was not needed when overclocking.
The board comes with three PCI Express x16 connectors (two x16 and one x8 electrical), two PCI Express x1, and two PCI 2.2 connectors. The layout of this design offers a very good triple x16 connector design. The second PCI Express x1 slot will be physically unavailable as will the second PCI connector if you utilize SLI with double slot cards. The third x16 slot can be utilized for physics acceleration if this option ever arrives from NVIDIA, or it can be used as a normal PCI Express slot for a wide variety of cards up to x8 speeds.
Getting back to CPU socket area, we find a fair amount of room for alternative cooling solutions. We utilized the stock heatsink/fan in our normal testing but also verified a few larger Socket-775 air cooling solutions such as the Tuniq 120 would fit in this area during our overclocking tests. The 650i SPP chipset is passively cooled with a mid-rise heatsink unit that did not interfere with any installed peripherals but did run hot without additional airflow over it during overclocking. The VRM components are passively cooled and the 8-pin ATX power connector is located out of the way. We will start providing thermal results of the various cooling solutions in our next article.
The rear panel contains the standard PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, two LAN ports, and four USB 2.0 ports. The LAN (RJ-45) ports have two LED indicators representing Activity and Speed of the connection through the Marvell Gigabit PCI-E PHY controllers. The panel also has an S/PDIF optical out port, S/PDIF coaxial out port, and an IEEE 1394 port.
The audio subsystem is based on the ADI AD1988B and offers 8-channel output along with full DTS Connect support. The AD1988B chipset and output ports are located on a separate riser card that ASUS has dubbed the SupremeFX. While this audio solution will not offer supreme performance over the Creative X-FI series, it certainly offers better performance and audio quality than the Realtek solutions, especially when comparing EAX 2.0 audio quality.
Overall, the feature set on this board is very good and certainly better than the EVGA 680i LT SLI board we recently reviewed, with both boards retailing for a similar price.
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37 Comments
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R3MF - Monday, April 2, 2007 - link
this mish-mash of different chipsets probably works fine under windows, because asus will provided a tailored nVidia driver to ensure it works.but they have always been rubbish at providing a linux variant of the proprietary systems design.
can i use the standard release nVidia linux chipset drivers to use this board under linux?
if the answer is 'no' then this board is garbage.
Gary Key - Monday, April 2, 2007 - link
This board uses the standard NVIDIA 680i driver set in XP and Vista. I had no issues loading SUSE 10.2 on the board but did not test it extensively with RAID or other options. The ADI audio worked but not as well as the Realtek offerings on other boards.yacoub - Monday, April 2, 2007 - link
but only for you and the other handful of folks in that situation...yyrkoon - Monday, April 2, 2007 - link
Yes, and no. Because users are fed up with MS/WIndows/Vista, a lot of users are making the plunge into Linux.Anyhow, it is the softwares responcability to comply with the hardware, not vice versa(to a point that is, obviously the hardware does need to comply with each specification, IE SATA, IDE, x86, etc.), if Linux is to be taken seriously, the Linux dev teams NEED to write a module for every possible chipset out there . . . if not, then well, you will have what you currently have right now, an OS, that does not support near as many hardware configurations, as Windows does.
Linux is a fun OS, and great for certain situations, but when you have problems like those caused by udev, and whatever else, you can not help but feel like it is not complete. Granted, the Linux dev teams for each distro, is usually much smaller than the teams that write code for Windows. End results however, tend to make this user feel as though Linux is a toy OS, with lots of work still needed. Ubuntu, is good for some situations, and a cutting edge Distro such as SabayonLinux, is also not without its quirks(but 'feels' very simular to Windows Vista.).
The end result is: what do *you* expect from a free OS ? Personaly, I like each, for different reasons, but still consider Windows to be the only real serious OS, mainly because of support for many, if not nearly all forms of hardware. Look and feel also are a consideration, but Linux has been closing the gap here, for a long time now.
Anyhow, that 'handful of users' is growing day by day, and is not really a 'handful' any more.
MrWizard6600 - Monday, April 2, 2007 - link
I could really use to see one. I don't see the differances between this board and a regualar 680i chipset, aside from the northbridges being different (which you would think would impact total PCI-e lanes but... apparently not..).so can you put together a map?
sWORDs - Tuesday, April 3, 2007 - link
Check this post, it's a dutch forum, but the first second and third table are english, and those are the ones you need.http://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_messages/...">http://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_messages/...
Gary Key - Monday, April 2, 2007 - link
Let me see what we can create tomorrow.