Asus P5NSLI

Richard's Thoughts:

I sit here in two frames of mind: why buy an SLI motherboard with two graphics cards, at twice the price, and such a cheap motherboard to save money? Even if you don't need audio, Firewire and the extra connectivity and just want something that works, you'd still be left with an SLI board that runs games pretty decently at high resolution, despite it's poor performance elsewhere due to the current issues with stability at higher memory speeds when 2GB of RAM is installed.

Understandably, the consumer in the market for this motherboard won't be thinking about selling a kidney to buy a Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU, but to directly compare the other boards we've tested and that are no longer with us we had to keep consistency. Obviously, the kind of person looking to buy the P5NSLI will probably be looking at pairing a Core 2 Duo E6300 with it. Those will give you a cheap and powerful combination ideally suited for gaming at high resolutions. If you are looking to treat the P5NSLI as a workstation for your video, picture and audio encoding then you are obviously going to loose out considerably more than others but this board is aimed at budget gaming and that's exactly what it does well.

The budget sector is a very hard and very large market to sell to. Consumers are more concerned on saving the fraction rather than critically analysing every feature. The benefit Asus has is that it has a large renowned brand name to weigh in on top of this motherboard. Even if it does loose out on price here and there, consumers may be tempted by the "brand name = quality" association that may sway their purchasing decision.

Application stability is very good once you find the sweet spot, but anything over that and it goes a bit dubious. It won't hurt to put a heatsink on the southbridge and possibly find something bigger for the northbridge if you intend to try to tweak this board. However, even the nForce4 Intel Edition motherboards did DDR2-667, yet the P5NSLI will not sit with a satisfactory stability when 2GB of memory is installed. Having said that, the nForce 570 SLI Intel Edition chipset uses the same northbridge as the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition chipset. So we can only assume that Asus has memory related issues in its current BIOS revision.

Personally I find that the SLI switch card is not the most favourite inclusion - not only is it somewhat fragile, but you have to remember to switch it around everytime you decide to install another card for SLI. It's not a simple case of installing a second card, clip on the SLI bridge and away you go; it turns into a major operation of fiddly proportions with both cards removed and then case angling in order to get the fingernails into such as position that allows you to remove and switch the selector over.

The cheapest UK price available the net excluding delivery, is from Digital Kind and More Computers at around £70. However, neither is available at the time of publication. If you're desparate to buy this motherboard today though, Overclockers has it in stock for £88. In the states you're looking at prices starting from a shade over $100 from XPCGear or GCanServices and upwards of $110 depending on your favourite etailor.

It's about twice the price of the cheapest Core 2 supporting board, but it is currently the cheapest SLI supporting. The P5NSLI is priced competitively against motherboards based on Intel's 945G chipset, but if you're looking for extreme budget (at the sacrifice of significant performance) then there are some VIA boards that will suit better.

Tim's Thoughts:

Rich has hit the nail on the head with this board, although I disagree with him on the marketability of this board. I think that there is a market out there for SLI at the low end, even though I've always said that I would rather buy one faster card than a pair of slower cards to use in SLI. Many end users buy one now and then upgrade with a second card later on - that's an area where this board is an attractive proposition. Someone who doesn't have a lot of money to spend on a system but is considering future upgrade opportunities will see this as an ideal solution.

However, if you're one of these people, don't expect to be able to overclock much. We tried overclocking the P5NSLI using our Core 2 Extreme X6800 and a Core 2 Duo E6400. We were unable to get the board to post with a front side bus higher than 300MHz using either CPU. NVIDIA has been up front with us, stating that the nForce 570 SLI chipset isn't tailored for overclocking. If you want an SLI motherboard taylored for overclocking Core 2 Duo processors, you'll have to look at an nForce 590 SLI solution - these are obviously more expensive.

We also put the board through the bit-tech stress test over the weekend using the stable memory timings that Rich found at DDR2-533. For those who don't know, the bit-tech stress test comprises of two instances of Prime 95, an instance of IOMeter and a Far Cry time demo looping at 1600x1200 4xAA 8xAF - these applications are all run simultaneously. We returned to the board and it was still running without error 66 hours later. Very impressive.

Rounding up:

We really like the P5NSLI for what it represents. It may be a pain in the butt to set up with the current BIOS, but everything seems to have a learning curve these days. Since the nForce 570 SLI Intel Edition chipset uses the same northbridge (and memory controller) as the older nForce4 SLI Intel Edition chipset, we're expecting a new BIOS to fix the memory-related issues we've had. Once you've found the sweet spot, the P5NSLI will run all day, every day without issue. With all things considered, it's a great board for the price, even with the current DDR2-667 issues we've encountered.