ASUS P5N-E SLI: NVIDIA's 650i enters with a Bang (Very nice "budget" board!)

[RPGW1ZaRD]

AnandTech: ASUS P5N-E SLI: NVIDIA's 650i enters with a Bang

Enter the first affordable nicely overclocking "budget" SLI Intel board with rather great performance and features. Prices in German online stores ranges from 107 - 125 EUR currently for example. $139.99 on Newegg. I think this may have been the board I'd have choosen myself right now if I built a Conroe system, my other choise would be Gigabyte DS3, Intel 650i based chipset board for about same price.

[General Plot]

I wonder how much overclocking potential it has. I'm looking at getting the P5B deluxe if I can't find something that does better.

[Silenus]

Yes the p5b deluxe is the best 965 board there is.

[El_Diablos]

It is for Conroe? interesting! and the price seems very good

[tuanming]

SLI and Cross-fire won't be needed anymore as of today and so forth. Why? Because a single 8800 GTX is more powerful than the 2 7950 series...As for Cross-fire, RD600 seems like more of a monster if you ask me and i bet you anything in the world, the R600 will beat the 8800 GTX.

[RPGW1ZaRD]

Well about the overclocking Anandtech commented like this:

We dropped the multiplier on our E6600 to seven and were able to reach 502 FSB without an issue. We were able to enter XP at 7x509 and the board would post at 7x519. However, at least with our sample, stability over 504FSB dropped off quickly and we feel like the board was designed with 500FSB in mind but not much more. We have seen user results that are around 480~506FSB with and without additional cooling so we feel confident that our review sample is not "special". We have a full retail kit arriving and will verify our results against it. We will also utilize the retail kit when we have other 650i SLI boards to review. Overall, the overclocking capability surprised us as we initially expected this chipset to be closer to a maximum bus speed of around 450 FSB.

It's not like that it has SLI support that makes it interested for me (I would never use SLI anyways but yet I sit with an SLI board currently too), it's the features and price, it has lots of slots for hdds, 2x ide connectors even which is getting rare these days and I have 3x ide + a 1x dvd-rw for example in this comp so I'd need those 2 connectors. ASUS P5B Deluxe is still the board that in avg provides highest FSB results but costs quite a lot more still and who needs much above 500 FSB (I'm sure most E6300 would have been satisfied with 500x7 = 3.5GHz if only the cpu would overclock that far and 500+ fsb is like only interesting for extreme overclockers that likes to break nice scores in benchmarks with preferable highend watercooling/phase change/dry ice/LN2 ) For me a board that is capable of 450 FSB is enough as I'd have settled for an E6600 and run it at one cpu lower multi to get 8x450 if cpu can do 3.6GHz and run ram with as good possible timings at DDR2-900 (Of course I would pick some DDR2-800 ram that I know ppl overclocks to DDR2-1000+ speeds with losened timings to be sure they handle 900).

Another thing that should be pointed out is that Intel 965i boards need relatively good ram for overclocking, this board should be able to user dividers or run it "unlinked" so you don't have to run mem at same speed as CPU.

Damn I so feel like buying a Conroe setup but my brain says "no, you already have good enough setup, no need for upgrade yet better wait for even better CPUs".

[shafeen]

yahoo good news well now i got fixed two components for my system which i would be bying next year
1.concore the first one price 180~~
2.this mobo price 140

thanks rigwizard thanks