Asus P5N-E SLI Motherboard Review

[Gizmo]

Thomas Soderstrom
SysOpt.com

The Asus brand brings with it a better reputation for quality, and often a price increase to match. Yet, Asus has also proven that it's serious about its push into lower-cost markets: So will its 650i motherboard, the P5N-E SLI, rival ECS' NF650iSLIT-A and prove itself a value leader as well?

Read more on the Front Paqe:
http://www.aoaforums.com/frontpage/content/view/2463/2/

[weldzilla]

This P5N-E sli board has been a fun board to play with! It is not as overpowering as the 975X but hey it only cost $134 when I bought mine. I found with my E6600 it is best to drop down from the 9x multi to the 8x. I achieve better performance. with the muti at 9X it is hard pressed to pull 412 fsb coming in at 3700. yet on the 8x multi it easily runs up to 467fsb for a speed of 3740. Which is also the same speed as the 6400 Allendale by the way. the nice thing at 467fsb is running your memory at 1:1 at DDR934 with good timings the little machine is really cooking!!!
I run this board daily at 425 1:1 which is a comfortable speed of 3400mhz all on air! No over heating here. Just a nice little system that runs out very smooth. clock for clock it is slower than my P5W DH but it is easily in the ball park on 3D scores. The board is easy to work with and is very stable with much less voltage than the P5W requires. So there are trade offs. I like the board myself and would recommend it as a nice budget board.

These scores you are about to see were done with my 7900GT with the Volt mod re-applied. and all were with my allendale processor

WZ

[weldzilla]

Well I decided to throw my new 8800gts into the mix and run my conroe 6600 on the board just cuz I can!! Now it is very hot here right now so I am only running the Conroe at 3600 mhz which is actually a quite common speed for this chip. I reduced the multi t0 8x so I could push my memory a little harder. I ran my 8800GTS 320 at a low clock of 600/900
When it is cool out I run it at 660 /1016 and higher for aqmk3. Well here are some scores for you to peruse again @ 3600 with mem on the 1:1 @ 450 x 2 = 900 on the mem The 3D03 was run the other morning very early and very cold with the vid card at 662/1020. It was a great run.
As you can see this budget board has the right stuff and will give your vid card a nice push into some great gaming. I will post up 05 and 06 at these lower clocks also.

WZ

PS. To give you an idea of just how much power the P5W DH packs When I ran AQMK3 at 3825mhz with this vid card at stock speeds 513/792
my AquaMark3 score was 192,000+!

[Gizmo]

Nice benches, WZ!

[weldzilla]

You know this board just can't match the power or the price of the P5W DH but, it is a budget board and it is really fun to play with. I am playing with it so much cuz quite frankly I have sold both of my P5W DH boards and yes I have another coming from the Egg early next week. I am not worried that my 2 boards were "Golden" The people that bought them were sure of it!! I am here to tell you I'll get the same results with the next one. So during the interim I have been playing with this P5N-E SLI.
It has not disappointed me one bit!!

WZ

[weldzilla]

You will see when I post these scores that in the 3D mark benches this system hangs right in there with anyone running this card.
Compare them to my P5W and they are really close!!
I'm telling you I like this little board more and more!!

WZ

[weldzilla]

I added more air to my system. Much more air!! I stuffed a another 90mm fan and another 120mm fan in the side window to give my cpu cooler more air to work with. It really helped!!
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2.../IMG_3458a.jpg
I will get a blue 120 headed this way eventually.
This morning I got up and was fooling with this computer (WZ-4b)
while WZ-3d was earning it's keep.
this is how that all went


WZ

[ccperf721p]

I had a P5N-E SLI for a short time. It was one of the few boards I have owned in awhile that I actually felt was worth a little more than I paid for it. Fun to use, booted with just about anything I had laying around and didn't have the usual quirks of a budget board. It was sure a lot better than the DS3 rev. 3.3 I paid $100 for and felt it should have been priced at $75.

I guess I'll have to write up some reviews of the boards I have here now. I will be starting a new build tomorrow using a DFI ICFX3200 T2R so I'll take pics and do a decent review of the board on air and water. If I end up keeping it I'll throw some phase results in as well.

[Uncle Bob]

Hi guys...haven't had time to get here in eons, it seems!

Having some fun with this board...Been stable here for days now.
Settled on this:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...lOCFORREAL.jpg

Got started with this (Note, MBM not reporting correctly here):
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...LI/FInalOC.jpg

[Samuknow]

Originally Posted by ccperf721p

I had a P5N-E SLI for a short time. It was one of the few boards I have owned in awhile that I actually felt was worth a little more than I paid for it. Fun to use, booted with just about anything I had laying around and didn't have the usual quirks of a budget board. It was sure a lot better than the DS3 rev. 3.3 I paid $100 for and felt it should have been priced at $75.

I guess I'll have to write up some reviews of the boards I have here now. I will be starting a new build tomorrow using a DFI ICFX3200 T2R so I'll take pics and do a decent review of the board on air and water. If I end up keeping it I'll throw some phase results in as well.

Spin up a review. We would be glad to post it on the front page...

[weldzilla]

Hey Uncle Bob glad to see you are getting nice results from this board too!

WZ

[Uncle Bob]

I've done better with the Gigabyte, but for the bucks, this board is quite good!

This is on air, too!

[weldzilla]

My matching 120mm fan finally arrived for side window. No more Green fan. I mounted it up last night. Mat and I were looking around at fans.
He wants a stronge side fan cuz he gets pretty warm while folding.
He ended up over at frozen cpu and bought himself a 250mm fan. To mount up. He is pretty excited to get it and mount it. I will post a pic when done.
The link to his fan.
http://www.frozencpu.com/products/54..._Case_Fan.html

WZ

[Daniel ~]

Great to see you posting again Uncle Bob! I came across the chip we penciled yeastuday looking for useful things...hard to say about that chip now...
":O}

[XeroHouR]

so, I posted this the other day, does anyone see a good connection between that $20 fan and the OP of this thread:
O.o Massive cooling

I might have met my match if so o.O