ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe WiFi Edition

AI Life:

Specific ASUS features included in the company's AI Lifestyle initiative include:

• AI Gear is where you can choose from 4 different modes (Max Performance, Auto, Medium Performance or Max Power Saving) for whether you want to get the most out of your system or not be deafened by fans.
  
  
• AI Nap is effectively a hibernation state to minimise the power usage whilst the user is away.
  
  
• ASUS Music Alarm does what it says on the tin, basically. Put your favourite CD into your optical drive and set the alarm timer in the BIOS. There is no need for your PC to be on or even in the OS, just keep it plugged in. It stops short at playing any other media like MP3 or FLAC, or even from a hard disk which is where most peoples music collections are. After all your hard disk music is always going to be there, but you might use a CD drive for something else and forget to put your CD back in and keep your speakers on.
  
  
• Crash Free BIOS 3 and EZ Flash 2 - Finally throw that floppy drive away because you can restore corrupted BIOS flashes from a USB stick. EZ Flash allows you to predefine a hotkey to enable quick BIOS flashing. This seems slightly dangerous in our opinion, but it does mean you don't have to risk booting into some form of OS to flash your BIOS.
  
  
• ASUS MyLogo 3 - Add a customisable boot logo. Useful for businesses who build PCs.
  
  
• ASUS System Clinic - A first aid utility in the BIOS that allows you to have a real time health check and determine system problems before entering the OS and possibly corrupting it.
  
  
• DTS Connect - DTS interactive "allows you to re-encode stereo or multi-channel sound into a multi-channel DTS signal" and DTS NEO:PC "turns your stereo audio such as MP3, WMA, CD into multi-channel audio". Aren't these effectively the same thing?
  
  
• PEG Link Mode - This is a feature of the nForce 590 SLI chipset, which enables automatic overclocking of the PCI-Express x16 bus when compatible GeForce 7-series video cards are installed.
  
  
• Precision Tweaker gives you all the settings enthusiasts want for manual system tweaking of CPU, bus speeds, voltages, etc.
  
  
• CPR Recall - Automatically resetting the system back to defaults after a failed overclock. No need to fiddle with CMOS jumpers!
  
  
• ASUS BIOS Profile - Create BIOS profiles for different setups: if you're testing how far new memory overclocks, you might want to save the older settings that definitely work.
  
  
• AI NOS - The Non-delay Overclocking System, with several presets that you can set to enable auto-overclocking when the system loads to give you the extra boost without having the system constantly overclocked and hotter than it should be all the time. You get the option of a pointless 1% to quite a substantial 15%, although as ever with overclocking: nothing is guaranteed.

That's a hell of a lot of additional features, but to be honest some the features are things that you'd come to expect on a modern motherboard, albeit with a different name for marketing purposes. I don't know anyone who'd use all of the features, but having the option to use some of the features is always welcomed. Features like AI Gear and AI NOS seem to conflict with one another, and AI Gear appears to be quite pointless.

BIOS:

The ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe uses a Phoenix Award BIOS that is layed out in a similar way to previous AMI-based ASUS motherboard BIOS'. Most Phoenix Award BIOSes are layed out differently to the way that ASUS does and it takes a bit of getting used to if you've never used an ASUS motherboard before. However, once you're used to the layout, everything is easy to access. We used version 0504 for all of our testing.

Most of the options that you're going to want are located under the 'Advanced' tab. The JumperFree Configuration menu option is where most of the clock speed control is handled - this is a little strange when there is also a CPU configuration menu option under the Advanced tab. Under the JumperFree Configuration menu, you will find AI Tuning, CPU Frequency, PCIEX16_1 Clock, PCIEX16_2 Clock, DDR2 Voltage Control, CPU Vcore Voltage, CPU Multiplier and an Advanced Voltage Control menu.

The CPU Frequency is adjustable from 200-450MHz, while the PCI-E clocks are adjustable from 100-200MHz in 1MHz increments. DDR2 voltage can be adjusted from 1.8V to 2.5V and CPU Vcore tops out at 1.5625V. The Advanced Voltage Control menu has voltage options for CPU Vcore Offset Voltage, DDR2 Termination Voltage, CPU to NB HT Voltage, NB to SB HT Voltage, NB Core/PCI-E Voltage, SB Core/PCI-E Voltage[/i] and SB Standby Core Voltage[/i].

Interestingly, the CPU configuration menu is home to the DRAM Configuration sub-menu - we would have expected this to be elsewhere. It's slightly confusing, but not really a massive issue. Under the DRAM Configuration menu, there are basic memory timing controls for Memory Clock Frequency, CAS Latency, tRCD, tRP, tRAS, 1T/2T Memory Timing and AI Clock Skew.

The advanced memory settings tab holds a whole host of additional memory timings, but it is only the first of three advanced memory timing configuration menus - the level of tweakability is up there with the DFI motherboards. Options include CPU On-die Termination, tRC, tWR, tRRD, tRWT, tWTR, tRTP, tWRRD, tWRWR, tRDRD, tREF, tRFC, DRAM Termination, Max Async Latency, R/W Queue Pass, Dynamic Idle Cycle Counter, Idle Cycle Limit, DCQ Bypass Maximum, DRAM Burst Length, RdPadRcvFIFO Delay, Disable Jitter, DRAM Bank Interleaving and Bank Swizzle Mode.

The DRAM Timing Control sub-menu has control for CKE Fine Delay, CKE Setup Time, CS/ODT Fine Delay, CS/ODT Setup Time, Address/Command Fine Delay, Address/Command Setup Time, Read DQS Timing Control, Write Data Timing Control and DQS Receiver Enable Timing. The final memory configuration menu has controls for the output driver control. The timings available are CKE Drive Strength, CS/ODT Drive Strength, Add/CMD Drive Strength, MEMCLK Drive Strength, Data Drive Strength, DQS Drive Strength and DRAM Drivers Weak Mode.

The SLI Ready Memory configuration option is located under the CPU configuration menu, too. It is not under the DRAM Configuration menu though - it just sits under the root menu. Options include Disabled, Optimal, High Performance and High Frequency.

The final area of the BIOS that is of interest to us is the chipset menu. Here, you can configure various chipset parameters - the nForce 590 SLI chipset is one of the most tweakable chipsets we've used, and there are plenty more tweak options under this menu. There are adjustments for NB to SB HT Frequency, CPU <--> NB HT Speed, NB --> SB HT Speed, SB --> NB HT Speed, CPU <--> NB HT Width, NB <--> SB HT Width and NVIDIA GPU Ex.

All in all, the BIOS is incredibly comprehensive. Everything is layered to help novices work through the BIOS without too much trouble, without removing all of the configuration options, preventing the enthusiast and overclocker from tweaking the board to their heart's content.

Stability & Overclocking:

We subjected the ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe WiFi Edition to our normal battery of stress testing. For these tests, we installed a pair of 1GB Corsair XMS2-8500C5 DDR2 memory modules and a pair of BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC's in SLI mode. The board was left running two instances of Prime95, IOMeter and Far Cry looping in the foreground at 1600x1200 4xAA 8xAF for 48 hours. When we returned to the system, it was still running Far Cry, and we could still hear the hard drive being accessed, meaning that IOMeter hadn't crashed.

After quitting Far Cry, IOMeter was not surprisingly still running and there were no errors reported. The two instances of Prime95 were still runnning too, meaning that the board had aquitted itself in a more than acceptable manner. Simply put, the ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe is as stable as a rock. The fun doesn't stop there though...

We overclocked the board using the 8.0x CPU multiplier on our Athlon 64 FX-62 to see how high we could push the HTT bus speed. Incredibly, we got this board running two instances of Prime95 stabilly for over four hours at 350MHz HTT with the memory using the 667MHz memory divider - this meant that the memory was running just fine at 1120MHz with 5.0-5-5-15-2T timings at 2.2V.

We then overclocked the board to find the maximum CPU overclock. Interestingly, we were unable to get the CPU to overclock quite as well as we did on the Foxconn C51XEM2AA, falling short by 8MHz. We got the board stable at 334x9 using a 1.475V vCore, which was impressive enough. However, when we tried to push board and CPU further, we encountered stability problems and the occasional failure to POST.