asus p5n-e SLI? (first intel build)

S

skudmunky

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Apr 1, 2005
Messages
1,462
Anyone know anything about this board? I'm building Core 2 Duo rigs for me and my dad over Christmas, and I'm pretty much set on everything but the motherboard. Originally I was looking at the Gigabyte DS3 and the Asus P5B, but I'd rather go with the nVidia chipset if it overclocks as well. I've heard the max FSB is 412.5 on the p5n-e, but if the stock speed is 200, that's still a decent overclock.

other part's I'm going to use
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300
EVGA 7900GS
OCZ S.O.E DDR2 800

I tried searching, but it turns up 2 threads and neither have any information.

I pretty much just need to know if this would be as good or better as the other asus and gigabyte boards.

thanks!
 
I had the same choice to make. I'll be using the same video card and CPU that you are. I stuck with some cheaper G.Skill 667 memory. I wasn't able to find any articles/reviews on the 650i at all, except for generic articles about the chipset itself. In the end I got the 650i just because I've got several PATA drives I want to hook up. I may or may not ever do SLI, but it doesn't hurt to have that option open without paying the extra $100 to go with the 680i boards.

I wasn't interested in overclocking, but here in a week when I put everything together I can at least say whether the thing works or not :p
 
Stock speed is 266, not 200.

For the price, I don't see why it wouldn't be worth checking out. $150 or so for a C2D SLI board that can probably OC a little bit anyway? Good deal in my book.
 
kirbyrj said:
Stock speed is 266, not 200.

For the price, I don't see why it wouldn't be worth checking out. $150 or so for a C2D SLI board that can probably OC a little bit anyway? Good deal in my book.
Click to expand...

thanks, I didn't know what the intel stock FSB would be. Still can't decide, the intel chipset has far great OC potential, more sata and usb, but a board layout I don't like, whereas the nVidia one has a few less sata and usb, but a very nice board layout and the ability to use ram dividers more (afaik anyway)

I'm probably not going to use SLI, I don't have the money to make it worth it. I mean, I'd rather get a 88xx series instead of 2 79xx cards.

any more people want to chime in?
 
Feature-wise, this is the board I've been waiting for. It's going to be a big enough gulp for me to make the jump to PCI-E, Core Duo, and DDR2 without losing all legacy support in the bargain, and this is the first modern Core Duo board that has the right feature mix for me. The 570 boards sometimes do, but there aren't many of them to choose from, and the reasonably priced ones often get pretty bad user reviews. 965, 975, and 680 boards don't have good legacy support, and with many of them the user reviews indicate that even what little support they have is buggy at best. The 945 boards that support Core 2, do so as a kind of add-on, and don't natively support faster memory. They are just getting too dated. And of course, out of all of those latter examples, the only ones that "officially" support SLI are the 680's.


As long as the 650i boards don't fall prey to whatever is going on with the bugginess of the 680's, they look like the ideal solution for me. Just hope the extra PATA support isn't flaky like on the boards that use those crappy JMicron controllers.
 
2 cents worth........I have the P5N32-E SLI (680i) and I love it so far. (not the same board)
I have a P5N-SLI, and though it is a rock solid board, it wont OC for shit.

It looks like this P5N-E board is this type......a stripped down version of the P5N32-E SLI, just like my P5N-SLi is a stripped down version of the P5N32-SLI.

The heat sinks look small, and I'll bet it wont OC well because of that. Just like mine wont. My P5N-SLi crashes at anything over 299 FSB.

Trust me, the board will be like a rock at stock......you can bet on it, I wouldnt want to rely on OCs though.
 
I think it's too early to write it off as a bad OCer. I know of only two people who have tried to overclock this board, and they both got 500+ FSB:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=126791&highlight=p5n-e+sli

[edit]
One big drawback (for me at least) is future proof-ness, since it's only PCI-E 8x in SLI mode. I know that the 8800 is requiring PCI-E 16x for SLI, and don't want to jump to any conclusions, but it might not be a far reach to say that all the dx10 and beyond cards will need 16x PCI-E for SLI..

Just something to consider..
 
magoo said:
2 cents worth........I have the P5N32-E SLI (680i) and I love it so far. (not the same board)
I have a P5N-SLI, and though it is a rock solid board, it wont OC for shit.

It looks like this P5N-E board is this type......a stripped down version of the P5N32-E SLI, just like my P5N-SLi is a stripped down version of the P5N32-SLI.

The heat sinks look small, and I'll bet it wont OC well because of that. Just like mine wont. My P5N-SLi crashes at anything over 299 FSB.

Trust me, the board will be like a rock at stock......you can bet on it, I wouldnt want to rely on OCs though.
Click to expand...

Those are completely different chipsets though. The Nvidia 5XX series didn't OC at all, where the 6XX seem to work fine for high FSB OCing. I think the 650i SLI board should be a decent OCer...especially at the price. Asus' naming scheme doesn't really help because you can't tell what chipset is in it unless you really know your Asus boards. You have to look at the specs. I wouldn't spend $100 on a 570 SLI board, but I'd pay $130-140 for the 650i (P5N-SLI vs. P5N-E SLI or something like that).
 
i'm eyeing this mb for myself for overclocking the soon to come e-4300's .


a few have been hitting 500+ fsb running a e-6300- over at XS--which isn't bad at all for a brand new MB/chipset thats running the shipped bios . i understand there are some quirks with it --but it is afterall an asus so a minor problem with v-droop is sort of expected . from what little i've seen of it with a few bios updates it could be very competive with the 965p/rd-600s and 680i's. for a reasonable price --

from what i have heard--it has most of the good features of the 680i's --even a 750fsb . the although the 965p is pretty much a slam dunk if you have good ram. this sli/650i with the additional ran dividers and the ability to run the ram clock seperate from fsb should be a very good additional feature . i have a great overclocking mb in the gigabyte 965p-s-3 --but i'm seriously looking at this asus 650i for my next build .

it would be certainly be worth a try IMHO. :cool:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top