ASUS P5NSLI: Core 2 Duo and SLI on a Budget
Posted by BlognThings in Hardware
"Engineering is the art or science of making practical."
This quote by noted writer and practicing engineer Samuel C. Florman describes our initial thoughts about the ASUS P5NSLI motherboard. There has been much fanfare over the past few weeks surrounding the release of Intel's impressive Core 2 Duo lineup of processors. Up until now the only motherboards available that supported this CPU series have been sporting chipsets from Intel or VIA. (ASUS also offers the P5N32-SLI Deluxe SE which has Core 2 support, although that uses the older nForce4 chipset.) In fact, we are just now seeing additional Intel chipsets such as the 945P, 945G, 946PL, and 865 being launched, with the G965 and Q965 products on their way in September. After the wave of 975X and P965 products introduced at launch we are witnessing these products maturing from a performance viewpoint. Everyone has been wondering if, when, and what type of chipsets NVIDIA and ATI would bring to market to support Core 2 Duo.
We are over a week away from the official launch of the NVIDIA nForce 590SLI Intel Edition and will have to wait at least a month before seeing the ATI RD600 based motherboards. In the meantime, the first nForce 570SLI Intel Edition motherboard has been released and is for sale at this time. We just received the ASUS P5NSLI board a couple of days ago and immediately started testing it. Our testing is by no means complete but we did want to provide some early information on the board along with a few select benchmarks. We will be utilizing this board in an upcoming comparison article and will publish a performance review in the near future once we have completed benchmark testing.
The ASUS P5NSLI motherboard is based on the recently announced nForce 570SLI Intel Edition SPP (C19-A3) and MCP (MCP51-A2) chipsets. If these chipsets sound familiar they should, as the chipsets are based on the earlier nForce4 SLI XE for Intel Edition products. The SPP had been revised slightly to ensure full Core 2 Duo support along with minor performance enhancements. Our first impression of the motherboard was very good as the layout of the board is clean and well organized for an SLI capable system. The initial stock performance results of the board show it to be competitive with the Intel P965 and 945P solutions while offering a price target around US $115.
The chart above lists the standard feature set available when utilizing the NVIDIA 570SLI for Intel SPP and MCP chipsets. The 570SLI SPP enables full support for X16 PCI-E or dual X8 PCI-E graphics card configurations, up to four X1 PCI-E devices, 16GB memory addressability, and native DDR-2 667MHz memory support. The 570SLI MCP enables support for 8 USB 2.0 ports, HD Audio with S/PDIF connectors, Gigabit Ethernet support, 5 PCI slots, 4 SATA 3.0Gb/s ports, and 4 IDE devices.
Read entire Review from source --> ASUS P5NSLI: Core 2 Duo and SLI on a Budget
