shanna's Full Review: ASUS P5N32-SLI Premium/WiFi-AP (P5N32SLIPREMIUMWIF...
I have a job that I truly love. Most of us aren't able to say that about the place we spend 40+ hours each week. A few years ago after Hurricane Ivan rearranged my entire life, I found myself starting over in every possible way. Finding a job in a hurricane devastated community isn't easy and certainly not a "dream job". If you were in the construction industry you could pretty much write your ticket, but for us other folks jobs were few and far between. So what does all this have to do with an Asus motherboard you may ask, well I landed my dream job at a local computer store and now own my own small computer business building and repairing PC's. It's awesome when we can take a thing we love, for me computers, and turn it into something that makes us a living. Due to this fortunate turn of events I have a great deal of exposure to a lot of computer Hardware. The hard part is deciding which of the many parts I come across I want for my own personal computers. My goal on my Latest computer was specific; I wanted a gamer this time around. When buying or building any PC know your end use well and build or buy with that specifically in mind. With this in mind I came to one conclusion quite quickly, I was going to design my System around the Asus P5N32-SLI Premium mainboard.
Choosing this board was actually quite simple, the Asus reputation combined with the plethora of features this board offers up made this mainboard my first choice. The AI series of boards Asus is offering right now are truly incredible. With gaming as my End result it was import that I chose a board that would provide excellent system performance for graphics intensive applications like games.
Out of the Box!
First let me state that what is inside the box is the most important element, however I must take just a moment to compliment The packaging designers who spent their time designing this box, its slick and sexy and even if I didn't know a darn thing About mainboard, I probably would have selected this box just because of it's sexy packaging! So enough already... what's in Box? As usual Asus provides you all the necessary components for your new build. A box inventory reveals: 3 SATA cables with Molex-to-SATA converters bundled together; 1 IDE cable; 1 floppy disk cable; 3 soft SLI bridges; 2 optional
Fans for the heatpipe system; Q-Connector Kit; WiFi-AP Antenna; Rear USB 2.0 port connector; Rear IEEE1394; a port SupremeFX PCIe x1 sound card; ASUS Array Mic; Drivers and utilities CD; Media Launcher digit; Floppy containing the SATA RAID drivers; WiFi-AP Solo User Guide; and a full instruction manual.
Wait Shanna, did you just mention WiFi? Yes I sure did, this mainboard supports 802.11 which means you've got built in wireless with this board, all I can say is SWEEEEET!
Features, Features and More Features!
Aside from my sneak peak at the WiFi perk, let’s talk about what all this board offers.
The CPU is your first and foremost thought... The P5N32-SLI is compatible with LGA775 socket for Intel® Core Extreme; Core Duo; Pentium® Extreme; Pentium® D; Pentium® 4 and Celeron® D Processors. This provides you a large range of Intel CPU's in varying price and performance ranges. My choice was a Pentium Extreme for this particular build and I am pleased with my Choice but that's another Epinion all together.
The chipset on the P5N32-SLI is the NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI Intel Edition. The front side bus is 1066/800/533MHz. Just what is a front side bus I'm often asked... No it's not something you ride, but it's definitely related to the big highway that Information travel inside your computer. The bus is important because it is the highway that data travels on and connects all of the major components, such as the CPU, memory, chipset, and AGP socket. Thank you Wikipedia for making that easier for me to explain.
How much RAM can I put on my board...? The P5N32-SLI offers up 4 slots for DDR2 memory with an 8 GB maximum load. I chose to Install 4 GB of Kingston DDR2. Pay attention to your manual when installing your RAM. You will find four DDR2 slots, 2 yellow And 2 black. My first experience with these slots taught me that you don't always install in pairs with Asus boards and this on in particular. For example if you were installing only 2 sticks of DDR2 one might assume you should load one in each yellow or each black slot. This however results in single-channel RAM. If you want maximum performance and dual-channel mode a stick must be placed in a yellow/black pair. Definitely read you manual on this section as it goes into good detail.
As always we need room to expand and ASUS didn't skimp here, our expansion slots include two PCI Express x16 slots which support SLI technology as we probably assumed from the name of the board! But what exactly is SLI technology? SLI stands for Scalable Link Interface and is extremely important when it comes to gaming. We hear a lot about SLI but it has actually been around since our first 3DFX video cards. What SLI does is combine two graphics cards into a single output which as one would assume provides far superior results.
The wireless feature is one of the reasons I chose this board above others. The 54Mbps IEEE 802.11g is backwards compatible with 802.11b. I loved this feature because this machine will be moved from time to time to a location in the house where there is actually no hard-wired ethernet connection.
When gaming sound is almost as important as graphics rendering and the included Audio Supreme FX card that is concluded provides nice hi-def audio with a built in noise filter for the enthusiasts amongst us. As most boards actually have the audio integrated onto the board below the USB ports I was pleased to find this was actually a slot loading card which took up a place on the back of my case, but not an actual PCI slot. This card offers DTS sound along with 24bit/192kHz full sampling in 7.1 surround and a microphone.
The board also offers 8 2.0 USB ports, 4 of which are mounted to the board and 4 ports on a back panel. With all these goodies in the build, heat is going to definitely be a consideration and Asus has generously provided me with not one but two fans to help keep the situation cool. One of the most striking features of this board is the beautiful copper heatpipes and heatsink onboard. However after reading the manual I found that these fans should only be used if your CPU is not using active cooling because they can actually hamper the airflow needed for CPU cooling. I guess I won't be using these nifty fans but did install them just to get a feel for them and found that they clamped right on with ease, just an FYI for those who may use them.
I guess for the sake of time I will move on to the actual build. When starting my new builds I lay out all my various parts and Accessories on my build table so they are all within arms reach of the case I'm assembling in. I always mount my CPU to the Board outside the case, I've seen some builders mount their board first, but I don't recommend doing it, I find it much easier to mount the CPU to the board prior to case installation. It also offers you the opportunity to ensure your heat sink prongs are securely and properly inserted. I also install my RAM at this point. All in all it took me about 15 minutes to assemble and Mount my board, connect my cables, install drives and prepare for my OS load. There are 3 sata cables included if you are interested in creating a raid and one IDE cable for IDE hard disk drives.
I built this machine as I've stated to be a gamer but also wanted to test Microsoft's newest OS Vista on all this excellent Hardware. The hard drive was partition to accommodate two operating systems, Windows XP Professional and Vista. My XP Pro install took a little over 20 minutes which was astounding as it usually takes over 45 minutes to completely load XP. I was already more Than pleased with my mainboard selection. If my OS load was going to go this smoothly I was simply dying to get some games loaded on this bad boy! As with most Asus high end products they even provide us with some bundled software. Mine came with several Multimedia packages: MediaOne Gallery, WinDVD Creator 2 Platinum, InterVideo PhotoAlbum, Disc Master 2.5 Platinum, DVD Copy 2.5 Platinum.
The BIOS is jam packed with features for overclocking, but I'm not going to go into all of that in this review. Suffice it to say That if overclocking is your game you will be more than satisfied with the options provided to you in the BIoS, Asus is well known for its overclocking features and doesn't disappoint here. My favorite feature in this particular BIOS has to be the Ability to manually set my bus speed for getting the maximum enjoyment of my board. The motherboard features the ASUS O.C. Profile that allows multiple BIOS settings. This is nice for overclockers who want to try multiple settings.
In all after I had my OS loaded, used my drivers disk to install all my drivers, I had only used up about an hour total of my time. I was now ready to get some games up and running. The kids installed their favorites... Quake, Final Fantasy, Scarface, etc and before I knew I was able to see the reason I built this machine, graphics in perfection, speeds faster than Dale Jr. on a great day at Talladega and design that was almost flawless. I am so thrilled with my decision to use this board. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in high performance gaming or overclocking.
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