ASUS was among the first Tier-1 manufacturers to release SLI X16 products when NVIDIA made the announcement last year. Rather than slapping on some new chipsets on their existing SLI motherboards and calling it a day, ASUS had overhauled the boards specifically for enthusiasts. As we've seen with the A8N32-SLI Deluxe, some of the workstation features of their Premium series were not exactly left out, but rather, they had been replaced. The ASUS P5N32-SLI Deluxe Intel based board we'll be looking at today continues the trend started by its AMD cousin, offering al of the same features, albeit with different CPU and memory support.

The P5N32-SLI Deluxe

The ASUS P5N32-SLI Deluxe board we received is part of their AiLife Gaming Edition package. As with their AMD board, this is the only package from ASUS available currently, so don't look forward to any cheaper or less featured versions of the board.

The newer ASUS boards, including their dual PEG Intel chipset based boards, follow a similar design, specifically the space between the PEG slots. This allows ASUS to standardize on the SLI bridge adapter, which is not a solid PCB board as found on earlier SLI motherboards, but rather a flexible one much like the one introduced with their Intel 955X Premium package. This particular connection is needed since the two PEG slots are slightly further apart than previous SLI motherboards.

As usual with ASUS, plenty of mandatory bits and pieces are included such as the motherboard manual, driver CD and rear IO shield. A WinDVD software suite is included as well for the "entertainment" side of things in the AiLife philosophy. There's no shortage of connections as ASUS throws in SATA, PATA, and floppy cables. A couple rear brackets are also included for IEEE 1394, USB and game port needs.

We mentioned it here before, but those of you who use liquid coolers for their CPU have probably noticed that surrounding MOSFETs get quite toasty during use. This is due to the fact that by using a CPU block, you remove the "extra" airflow that a traditional air cooler provides. ASUS includes two cooling fans that can be snapped on to the MOSFET heatsinks that not only cools that heatsink, but it also generates some airflow to the surrounding area. ASUS recommends not to use this if you're using an air cooler as this will disturb the airflow the CPU cooler is designed to provide.

The motherboard layout of the P5N32-SLI Deluxe is very good as ASUS has done the most they could optimizing the PCB space for their components. The CPU area does appear to be cluttered given the proximity of the capacitors and heatsinks, but we did not have any clearance issues with our asetek VapoChill Micro, Scythe Ninja and Zalman CPNS9500.

We did not test with many water blocks, but the Koolance CPU-300 and Cooler Master R120 block also installed problem free. With the waterblocks in place, we tried to install the optional motherboard cooling fan mentioned earlier and had no problems with the Koolance block. The only instance where we were unable to install the motherboard cooling fan was when we used the Cooler Master R120 inside a Lian Li V1000. Due to the radiator's location, we were unable to mount the cooling fan for the MOSFET as the radiator got in the way.

The P5N32-SLI features a couple motherboard features designed for enthusiasts. The board features an 8-phase power design that creates a steady power supply environment for the CPU and generates less heat than a conventional power design. The end result should be better overclocking ability as well as increased overall stability.

Another unique ASUS feature is their Stack Cool 2. Naturally, this is a zero-noise cooling solution and works by transferring heat generated by the CPU and surrounding components and dissipates the heat on the other side of the PCB. It does get warm there, but truth be told, we're not sure if it's wise to move heat through the motherboard.

Each of the copper heatsinks by the CPU socket are connected to the two chipset heatsinks on the motherboard via a couple heatpipes. Basic heatpipe theory applies here as heat evaporates the liquid, moving it to the other end where it condenses and the cycle repeats. The included cooling fan will help matters greatly here to improve the performance if you're going to use water cooling.

There are four ram slots, colour coded for Dual Channel supporting a maximum of 4GB. We've had no issues with Mushkin, Kingston and Corsair modules up to speeds of DDR2-800. We do find that the ram slots are a bit close to where a video card will line up when plugged into PEG slot #1. The ram slots are far away from the CPU socket that none of our test coolers caused any installation problems with our ram.

In this same area are the floppy, ATX and Primary IDE connections. There is also a system fan connection located between the ram slots and floppy connection. We do prefer the ATX connection along the edge as ASUS has done. It keeps power cabling away from the CPU area, therefore not impeding airflow. While a 20-pin ATX power cord will probably do for a conservative setup, we highly recommend a high quality 24-pin capable power supply.

You won't find 15+ drive support as you would on the "Premium" boards (a slight exaggeration), but the P5N32-SLI still has support for multiple drives in various setups. The four blue SATA connectors are handled by the nForce 4 SLI Southbridge. These connections are SATA 3Gb/s compatible and backwards compatible with the older 1.5Gb/s spec. NVRAID support is present of course, and the user has options for RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 or JBOD.

The secondary IDE is also in this area and supports the same RAID options if spanned across the SATA drives. The CMOS reset is also located in this area and is a major improvement over its placement on the A8N32-SLI.

Moving on to the peripheral slots, we can see the two x16 PEG slots sandwiching two PCIE connections. We mentioned the space between the PEG slots earlier. The added space (3 slots between the PEG slots according to ASUS) will allow for specialized cooling for SLI setups. Of course, you'll likely lose the use of the adjacent PCI and PCIE slots, but this will not be the case if you stick with single slot cooling.

Between the PEG slots lies the EZ-Plug connection. The EZ-Plug is there for SLI setups and provides additional power for stability. In single card, even high powered ones, it's not really necessary to install a Molex connection here. Granted, we used an Enermax SLI certified PSU here in a single card environment for our initial tests, so those of you with cheaper PSUs may want to think about using the EZ-Plug connection, or better still, replace the PSU.

To the right of the first PEG slot is the internal SATA connection for the Silicon 3132 controller. RAID 0, 1 and JBOD are supported, but only when used with another SATA drive (two total). As you can see in the image below, that second connection is an external one, meaning you'll need an internal and external drive to create a RAID set. Not exactly something we see people doing for the most part.

Round things out are the external inputs and outputs. From left to right we have; two PS/2 ports, coaxial and optical S/PDIF ports, parallel, external SATA, sound connections, two Gigabit LAN, four USB and FireWire.

The BIOS

As usual with ASUS, the AMIBIOS is the center of the A8N-SLI Premium's board level tweak options. Everything is neatly arranged and pretty self explanatory. We figure most of you don't need a refresher on the basic items, so we'll go right into the juicy bits.

Under the Advanced page, many of your configuration and tweak options can be found here. While it may not seem terribly useful for single PC home users, in a networked environment, the LAN2 Cable Status page linked here can be a very useful tool when trouble shooting network issues. It can spot a faulty cable and point out where the fault may be within a meter, but in the case where the cable is fine, this should tell the user to look at the switch, router or NIC.

As with all ASUS enthusiast boards, the P5N32-SLI offers a variety of CPU, chipset and memory tweak settings. While most of you will probably choose to do things manually, for those less experienced, you can let the board do it for you. "Auto" is just preset optimal , but safe settings and is the default out of the box. "Standard" is conservative, while AI N.O.S. is the ASUS AI Non-delay Overclocking System feature that will intelligently determine the system load and boost performance accordingly. The scale ranges are 1%, 3%, 5% and 10%.

There are some settings you can adjust in the advanced CPU settings, such as EIST and Execute Disable, but this will vary on which LGA775 processor you use. Also, most of you (unless you got inside connections or resourceful eBay skills) will have locked processors, so the ratio values will be unavailable.

There are additional settings for the SB and NB settings (both offer options of 200MHz to 1000MHz), as well as some PCI Express tweaking. Setting the PEG Link Mode to auto will adjust the frequency automatically depending on the system setup.

The P5N32-SLI Deluxe is loaded with onboard peripherals, as well as legacy inputs and outputs. All of these can be enabled or disabled. Keep in mind that in order to use the NVIDIA Firewall, you need to enable LAN2 as LAN1 is restricted to Windows security only.

For Performance Options, there's plenty you can do here. You an enable or disable the two optimizing modes for extra performance or stability. These are preset tweaks. For the System Clock mode, when set to auto, the system automatically configures the FSB and memory speeds. Linked mode overclocks the two proportionally, and manual lets you do things the old fashion way.

PCI Express Frequency isn't something most of you will play with unless overclocking sets this out of sync. User configurable options are 100 to 148.4375. Finally, the memory timings can tweaked here as well, with all the usual options available.

Software

There are some Windows based applications included with the board, but of note is the AI Boost. The AI Boost is a Windows based overclocking, system monitoring tool and provided you have the board set to AI N.O.S., you can do some overclocking from a Windows interface.

NVIDIA nTune wasn't on our CD, but the software can be downloaded free from NVIDIA's site. InterVideo's DVD suite is included on a separate CD and allows you to create, backup non-copy protected disks, and playback DVDs. Norton Internet Security 2005 is also included as well as a Windows based BIOS and driver update utility.

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