Overclocking and Cooling

With stock Intel cooling and an Intel Extreme Edition 3.73GHz, the system handled all the AI N.O.S. settings just fine. Moving on to manual overclocking, we stuck with our typical OC setup; open Lian Li V1000 case with a Koolance EXOS configured at high speed fan settings. We also used both of the the heatpipe fans ASUS includes with the package to keep the air moving.

We had some success overclocking the 3.73EE. Our maximum FSB was 318MHz, which works out to 4.45GHz. This fell a bit short with our overclocks on the 925XE and 955X, but only by about 7MHz. We did get as high as 324MHz for the FSB, and successfully POST and get into Windows. The system did crash though, and we were unable to reboot without a CMOS reset. Without the active coolers, we had similar results, but the maximum stable overclock was 317MHz.

We set the system back to stock speeds and ran some load testing with and without the additional coolers. Under load, the North Bridge hovered around 54°C without the fans running. With both fans hooked up, the NB was about 50°C. The CPU had less of a drop, going from 56°C to 54°C.

Final Words

While we can get hard numbers showing the improvements of SLI X16, we'd be hard pressed to tell you if our gaming experience was any better. With the current crop of games, the experience was no different between the MSI P4N and ASUS P5N32-SLI boards, but this may change with newer hardware and games. Those of you currently using solid SLI X8 boards probably won't lose too much sleep if you hold off SLI X16 boards at this time.

Over the several weeks of testing, the ASUS P5N32-SLI Deluxe has been very stable and reliable. However, it was not always like this. Out of the box, it took us a good week to get our test system 100% stable, at stock speeds(!) on top of that. Windows would install without incident, and the driver installation would go smoothly. The system seemed to run fine, so we proceeded to install our usual suite, rebooting as needed, but at totally random intervals, the system would not get past the loading Windows splash page. We rebooted into safe mode and even that didn't always work.

At first, we suspected it was the NVIDIA NIC since we noticed the ASUS driver CD would skip the NVIDIA Access Manager installation (we forced installation via web drivers), so we tried uninstalling the network drivers. That didn't work (system ran fine, but random reboots would again result in no boot), so we disabled the NIC. That seemed to work, but on a reboot, the system again hung at the load screen. ASUS was unable to assist, but the one trend we always noticed was it would exhibit this behavior whenever the NVIDIA drivers were installed. A bit of research pointed us towards the SATA controller, and by luck we heard some crunching noises (probably not something we should be happy about) from the drive during reboot, and a check in the event log showed us this:

It seems that several nForce motherboards (this issue is not unique to ASUS) have problems with NCQ. As of this writing, the 6.85 drivers (dated February 2, 2006) do not address this issue with certain hard drives. All of our Seagate hard drives suffered from this, as did our NCQ enabled Maxtor Diamondmax. Our Western Digital Raptor seemed to work, but ended up dying during 3DMark06 (it was on its last legs anyhow). Some users reported that disabling NCQ in the Device Manager would help, but not for us. By leaving out the SW IDE driver in the NVIDIA drivers, we relied on the built in Microsoft drivers. This was 3 weeks ago, and so far we're happy to report all is well. Though this seems to be a cross platform issue with the nForce SLI, we didn't see any of this with the ASUS A8N32-SLI or the MSI P4N Diamond.

Other than the hard drive controller, everything else worked fine. There have been reports of corrupt files with the ActiveArmor firewall enabled (with default settings), so we moved a large number of files ranging from 20MB to 3GB to and from the P5N32-SLI to an ASUS A8N32-SLI with no issues. We also uploaded several 100MB RAR files to our FTP site as well as downloaded several game patches with no corruption. On a side note, the Marvell NIC also performed well, with slightly lower CPU usage than the NVIDIA NIC but with CPU usage about 2% higher than the NVIDIA NIC.

Once we solved the drive issues, overclocking and stock stability testing went very well. Noise is a moot point unless you're using a water cooled setup, ironically enough. The North Bridge and South Bridge do get very warm, and we do suggest using the included fans. Temperatures were between 2°C to 4°C lower across the board making the fans worthwhile.

The heatsinks scattered on the board do get very hot under load when using a water cooler and I highly recommend using the included onboard fan. It may not be necessary when running at stock speeds (it still gets hot though), but I think it's a mandatory installation overclocked.

Truth be told, this really is an excellent board. However, we are hesitant to give it the two thumbs up simply because of the mysterious drive issues. Maybe we got sacked with a problem board, but we did try to have this addressed but haven't heard back in time for this deadline. Facts are facts and there are obvious drive issues that have not been addressed yet. Other than that, the P5N32-SLI Deluxe is fast and stable and loaded with features. If you can currently live without fully enabling NCQ, which isn't that important for everyday use, you'll be quite happy with the speed and options the P5N32-SLI Deluxe provides. Just don't say we didn't warn you.

If you have any comments, be sure to hit us up in our forums.

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