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

First Thoughts

Once again we have to ask the $64,000 question: did NVIDIA succeed in designing a competitive chipset when compared to the Intel P965? Our answer to that question is a very reserved yes. While the chipset was very competitive in the majority of our early benchmark results, we have to wonder if this is due to the ASUS implementation or if our results indicate the actual strength of the chipset. Until we are able to test more motherboards based on this chipset it will be difficult to give a final answer. We have some hunches however and believe the chipset is competitive but certainly does not deliver a knockout blow to the P965.

Our initial thoughts are based upon how sensitive the board is to memory timing changes and types of memory utilized. We found the memory and chipset timings are tweaked very tightly resulting in a very narrow band of settings that are stable. We have discussed our memory timing issues with ASUS several times and currently we are awaiting a full response. While this is a drawback to the board, if you have memory capable of running at 4-4-4-12 1T at DDR2-800 then this board offers excellent gaming performance and very good application performance. ASUS can be congratulated for getting excellent results in the game and synthetic benchmarks, but it appears to be at the expense of memory compatibility. Of course, P965 also had quite a few issues with memory compatibility when it first launched, so perhaps NVIDIA and the board manufacturers just need a bit more time to become acquainted with the needs of the chipset.(Update - ASUS will be providing a Beta BIOS early next that addresses our memory timing issues.)


We have tested the board for over a week now with a wide variety of components in several different configurations. The board has proved to be extremely stable and performs very well when the right memory settings are applied. We still have significant testing left to complete once our retail kit arrives, but at this time we really like the chipset and the motherboard. The performance of the board and the fact it has a decent set of features leaves us wondering why we would spend over a $100 more for the 680i boards. Sure, the 680i boards have additional features such as dual Gigabit Ethernet connections with DualNet technology, dual x16 graphics slots along with a slot designed for physics capability, an additional two SATA 3Gb/s and USB 2.0 ports, and enhancements like LinkBoost, SLI Ready Memory, and extended overclocking capabilities. However, does every user need these additional features?

We think not, and we believe the 650i SLI chipset offers basically the same or better performance as the 680i about 95% of the time for significantly less money. It may turn out that this chipset isn't so much of a P965 killer but instead is a 680i killer in most cases. This is actually good news as this chipset was designed for the mainstream performance market and the 680i really is meant for the small but very vocal enthusiast sector. Coming back to the P965, we found the 650i SLI offered similar performance in most cases and excelled in gaming where its main purpose in life exists.

The advantages the 650i SLI offers is official SLI support, native IDE chipset capability along with support for four IDE devices, flexible memory and FSB settings, and a similar price to performance ratio when compared to the P965. The main negatives we see are increased power consumption, memory bandwidth is lower overall, and FSB overclocking is comparatively lower (although the true capabilities of the chipset are not yet fully known)than the upper end P965 motherboards.

In many ways that's the biggest concern at this time: the unknown. We do not know how this chipset will perform when utilized in other board designs and what the average cost for the board will be in the near future. We have seen the ASUS P5N-E SLI offered for around $129.99 and at that price with the right set of memory, we think it is a great bargain, especially if you plan on running an SLI setup or have multiple IDE devices still in use. We still have a lot of questions about this chipset and motherboard, too many to pass final judgment on either one at this time, but we will report back in the near future with additional test results and hopefully a look at several other new boards based on the 650i SLI chipset. We think this chipset has a bright future in the mainstream performance market and believe ASUS has, at first look, designed a very good board around it.