Motherboards

Asus P5N-E SLI Motherboard
You know that when building the perfect PC, the motherboard is as important as anything. That's why you should check out this Asus P5N-E SLI mobo. This motherboard supports the latest Intel® Quad-core processors in LGA775 package. It's excellent for multi-tasking, multi-media and enthusiastic gamers! It's designed for great performance and overclocking! With an NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI chipset and a front side bus capable of 1333/1066/533 MHz, your machine will be ready to chew up anything you feed it. Four 240-pin DIMM sockets support up to 8GB of DDR2 non-ECC unbuffered memory. DDR2 is the next generation memory technology to replace the current DDR. With the highest speed up to 800MHz, DDR2 memory provides great performance for 3D graphics and other memory demanding applications. This great platform has 2 PCI Express x16 slots, 1 PCI Express x1, and 2 PCI 2.2 slots! There's Gigabit LAN, support for up to 8 USB 2.0 ports, and tons more features! Check out the detailed specifications for all the goodies in this powerful motherboard. Don't settle for something less. Pick up the Asus P5N-E SLI motherboard today!





ASUS is responsible for making some of the industry's best motherboards, though many of them can also be the most expensive money can buy. Lucky for us, that is not the case with the P5N-E SLI we are testing today, at least not the expensive part.

When purchasing an ASUS motherboard, consumers are not just paying for a brand name. ASUS' build quality is excellent and more often than not, the overall package and bundled features are also very valuable. Recently however we were let down by an overrated and overpriced ASUS product that did nothing else but sell a brand name. That product is no other than ASUS' flagship Striker Extreme. This member of the “Republic of Gamers” costs a crazy $400, making it nearly untouchable to the real gaming and enthusiast crowd.

Although ASUS is happy to take your money for this overpriced board, they also seem to be aware of the importance to deliver a good value, high performance product for the rest of us. They came up with the P5N-E SLI which has been designed around the ultra-affordable Nvidia nForce 650i SLI chipset.

Out of all the new nForce 6-series chipsets, this is easily the smartest option for those that are seeking SLI support on the Core 2 Duo platform without all the extravagant options. Performance-wise the 650i SLI is every bit as good as the 680i SLI, so why does the P5N-E SLI cost just $140 when the competing ASUS 680i SLI board costs $270?

When it comes to features there is quite a lot missing from the 650i SLI, though none seem to have a real impact on performance. Motherboards equipped with the nForce 650i SLI miss out on 1333MHz FSB support (at least for now), EPP memory support, 28 PCI Express bus lanes, two SATA ports, two USB ports and one Gigabit LAN port. I would say most users can turn a blind eye to the missing ports, and at least some will ignore the lack of official 1333MHz FSB and EPP memory support, but the 28 missing PCI Express bus lanes sound kind of serious