Asus P5N32-E SLI Plus Motherboard

Shiny!

I just took delivery of this motherboard on Friday (19^th January 2007). There has been a fair bit of discussion about this new motherboard, but no reviews or even details on the Asus site. This is odd, as this board is in stock at several online retailers who have no stock of the Striker Extreme or older P5N32-E. As I am in possession of one, I have decided to put up what details I have, along with some photos. I originally had the Striker in mind but gave up waiting.

By the way, you can see photos I have taken of almost everything except motherboards here. A DSLR is probably overkill for motherboard reviews :-)

I am not going to do a full review, and I couldn’t right now even if I wanted to, because I don’t have all the parts for my new system. I have the motherboard because I ordered from Overclockers.co.uk, and I do not have my RAM, CPU, case, PSU etc. because I ordered them from Dabs.ie – a week before I ordered the mobo from OCUK.

The Box

WTF is up with the slogan? "Rock Solid – Heart Touching" – I could have come up with better myself.

Otherwise the packaging is slick, as you can see.

Note that the front is the only place that the nForce 680i SLI chipset is mention is on the red disclaimer on the front. The manual does not say what the chipset or individual northbridge or southbridge model numbers are, which is weird.

The Board

From what I can tell, the only noticeable difference between this board and the previous non-plus version is that it has almost entirely red capacitors, and those are meant to be higher quality.

If you lift the Asus P5N32-E SLI Plus sticker near battery, the board has “Striker Extreme” printed on it. This is the same circuit board as the Striker Extreme, but with fewer chipset heatpipes and without the extra components soldered on such as the board LEDs, the LCD poster at the back, switches, s-SATA ports etc.

This was also true of the non-plus version of this board. However the newer board seems to have the same number of red capacitors as the Striker Extreme, which is an upgrade, as they should be more reliable.

Other stuff in the box

The pictures above show what is included along with the board. I have not shown the manual or driver disk.

This stuff is the same as the older P5N32-E as far as I am aware.

I am a bit disappointed with the bundle. This is the 4^th Asus motherboard board I have owned and you are usually pleasantly surprised at what you get thrown in the box, especially software. This time I noticed two things:

• The software disc has just ASUS utilities and drivers, no extras like Nero or DVD software like WinDVD as you could get before.
• There is a plethora of USB connectors inside this motherboard, courtesy of the 680i chipset. The expansion slot card only has two USB ports on it. The one that came with my K8V Deluxe from three years ago had 4 USB ports and two motherboard connectors, even though that board does not have support for 10 USB ports. I am going to swap them and use the old one in my new system.

That is all for now!