ASUS P5N-T Deluxe Review

[vX.DreDge]

REVIEW: ASUS P5N-T Deluxe

By:Shahid :vX.Dredge: Aziz

Introduction

We recently got our hands on a motherboard from Asus, the P5N-T Deluxe. Hard to see how time flies, seems like yesterday we were checking out the 680i platform. The first 3-way SLI motherboard from Asus - the P5N-T Deluxe features three PCI Express x16 slots and support for 3-way SLI to start with. The first glance of the board is promising enough, but the motherboard’s oversized cooling apparatus clearly means that “it’s all business.”

A BRIEF LOOK BACK
With the launch of Nforce 6, Nvidia clearly made its point that it is not going to let Intel take the big slice. After acquiring ATI, AMD started producing in house chipset once again after a long time, Nvidia realized that things at the AMD camp will soon change and they will not promote Nforce for their processors any more, and they will be graded second category player in AMD chipset market.
Now here we are, once a pure AMD chipset dominating player, is now a worthy competitor to every chipset that INTEL has to offer for its CPU. Today Nvidia not only has some of the best chipsets at hand, but it also has the edge in the form of SLI over Intel, and Nvidia is not letting it slip in Intel’s hand any time soon
Now we all know that 680i was perhaps the most feature rich chipset that NVIDIA has produced for Intel CPU, making it the ideal choice for Core2Dou based systems for many of you guys out there, so what was the reason behind releasing 780i, let’s just find it out.
Nvidia being caught up between a rock and a hard place, has to counter everything that Intel and AMD has to offer to stay competitive, with the launch of 780i, Nvidia managed to not only upgrade its 680i to support TRI-SLI, but also implemented support for PCI-E 2.0 through Nforce 200, thus tackling both AMD and intel at the same time.
second and perhaps the most important reason to launch a 780i board was to” Officially” support Tri-SLI on PCI-e II. I really do wonder if everyone would be able to go crazy and buy three 8800GTX or ultras since only the highest end of the graphics cards have dual SLI Bridge.

Block Diagram of Nvidia 780i

NVIDIA ESA (ENTHUSIAST SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE)

As it stands today, many of the major components in a typical enthusiast class PC have built-in mechanisms for monitoring the health status of the device. Processors and GPUs have internal thermal diodes for monitoring temperatures, and graphics cards and motherboards have sensors for monitoring a myriad of voltages and things like fan speeds. Other components, however, like cases, power supplies, and cooling systems, for example, usually don’t have any such mechanism. And even if they do, odds are it uses a proprietary interface that isn’t universally compatible.

To remedy this situation, the crew at NVIDIA has architected a new open standard the company hopes will be adopted across the industry. ESA, or the Enthusiast System Architecture, as it is known, was designed for real-time monitoring and control of PC power supplies, chassis and water cooling systems.

SPECIFICATIONS

THE VISUALS
Pitch Black

the box is more or less exact like any other AI series board boxes, packed in a nice decent packaging, it not only protects the board inside but also demands you to open it and have a closer look.

on lifting the flap the box will speak for itself telling you about all the exciting new features it packs.

THE ACCESSORIES
the accessories that comes with the board are good enough, lets take a look

User Manual
Driver CD
Fan for heat pipes
IO Back plate
Molex to Dual-SATA power converter
Asus Q Connecters
SLI bridge
3-way SLI bridge
HDD IDE cable
6 x SATA cables
FD IDE cable

[center]

packed carefully under the accessories tray, lies the beauty itself. The first thing I had in mind when saw this board was, WOW its beautiful and I am sure you would think more or less the same.
the Black PCB is really attractive for enthusiast and ASUS sure do know that.

the heat pipe system, the action attraction.

DETAILED LOOK

a separate baby heat pipe system can be seen alongside the 780i itself. This is the nforce 200 that that controls PCIE-2.0. a hypertransport link connects 780i with Nforce 200 (See Block Diagram)

the TRI-SLI itself. If you plan to really buy Three GTX or ultra and put them in TRI-SLI configuration, then say good bye to the only PCI slot you have got there. Heaving TRI-SLI configuration and expecting to have some room to install another PCI card is impossible unless you have a water cooled system taking care of the heat generated by the beasts.

Asus has also provided with the tri –SLI connector as well, which I am sure almost all of you are not going to use, At all. Asus also supplied the board with standard SLI connector, which is I think really handy where you can put two midrange GPU’s together, which by all means is highly acceptable because to me 3 very hight end VGA cards in one system is ultimate overkill.

EPU-Energy Processing unit, you really have to dig in deep in the board to see it, I had a hard time finding it myself. It can be found right next to the memory banks.

Being the proprietary technology from ASUS this will only be available in ASUS boards. According to ASUS EPU CAN help reduce the energy demands up to 60% depending on the requirements. Impressive!

The I/O Area , you can easily see that it has all the goodies that you can think of, virtually anything can be attached to it, pretty decent I say.

- PS/2 keyboard connector
- PS/2 mouse connector
- 1 x SP/DIF Optical digital audio output
- 1 x SP/DIF Coaxial digital output
- 1 x e-SATA ports
- 1 x Firewire ports
- 4 x USB ports
- 1 x RJ45 LAN Port
- 8 channel analogue sound output

the area around the CPU socket is pretty vacant, you can easily mount any sorf ot mammoth Coolers on it, which is really nice considering the fact that there is going to be some hot summers here in Pakistan and people will need huge coolers to calm their quad cores, or over clocked Dual cores for that matter.

IDE connectors have always been a issue for me, if by any chance I had to plug in the cable after I have mounted the board in the casing and plugged in the power cable, I am in trouble, and here lies the same issue, you are going to face a lot of hard times to find your way between the Power Connector itself and the memory to plug the IDE cable. So you need to make sure that the IDE cable is there before you decide to plug the other connectors on it.

Enough of the Spoiler, lets get down to business.

TEST SETUP

WHAT I AM EXPECTING
to be honest I am expecting nothing new from 780i when comparing it with 680i, because to me it’s just the 680i with PCI-E 2.0 support and that’s it. If it was a whole new core logic, then I would have high hopes for it to outperform the 680i.

INITIAL TESTS

CPU-Z recognizing the Processor under windows Vista.

now this is where things are interesting look at the chipset and the south bridge.

Running other tools to diagnose the system displays the same results, chipset unknown.

OVERCLOCKING
Over clocking voids warranty and may harm your computer components. The settings that I am using are nowhere near the suggested settings and therefore if any one of you turns its PC into an expensive paper weight, don’t blame me.

Now we all know how well core2 can scale, all it requires is a decent over clock able board and you can have the fastest CPU at the lowest of prices, but there is a catch, it only comes down to the board FSB capabilities in the end.

Since I had hands on the 680i based striker extreme, I decided to implement the same method of over clocking that I used with the striker extreme.
As soon as I entered its BIOS I felt like at home, the same old Phoenix BIOS welcomed me with loads of features to over clock and over volt the system.

I began by increasing the desired voltages and unlinking the Memory FSB with system clocks, then slowly stretching the FSB by the 40 Mhz increment and upon each boot I made sure that the system was stable enough to sustain any sort of torture test that I put it through.

at 1466 Mhz FSB with multiplier X9.0 the board was rock solid performer and didn’t moved an inch, but ironically I was unable to push it further anymore.
At 3.3 Ghz the temps were very acceptable for both the board and the processor but its freezing outside and the P5N-T is lying bare naked, which means that either you don’t over clock at all, or if you really plan to over clock this baby make sure that your casing is well ventilated.

BENCHMARKING

Before I go any further I would like to mention that these results do not replicate the actual performance of the Board, the settings that I used for the benchmark might be different than the settings that you would use.

Sisandra XII

Sisandra XII Offers wide variety of benchmarking tools that can pretty much torture any system out there, we will kick off by doing just that.

SiSandra CPU Multiledia

SiSandra Cache / Memory bandwidth

SiSandra Multi Core Efficiency

SCIENCE MARK 2

PCMARK VANTAGE
despite several dying efforts I was not able to run a complete test at all, the program just stopped responding when it came down to HD playback.

FUTUREMARK 3D MARK 2006

PERFORMANCE IN GAMES
Although the VGA card is highly involved in rendering frames, I still played a couple of famous titles by reducing the resolution to 1024 x 786 and the rest to defaults, this would make sure that the Cpu and memory subsystem are maximum involved in the game throughput.

CALL OF DUTY 4 - MODERN WARFARE

The game showed a good 20 frames increment over the default, Neat!

CRYSIS

being the most resource hogging game till date, this game has the tendency to bring down any highest end PC or graphics card to its knees. Stretching E6600 to a good 3.3 Ghz resulted in only 4 Fps increment.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R - Shadow of Chernobyl

Again we see a decent increment in frames .


CONCLUSION

The Asus P5N-T Deluxe comes with a decent package. Being an AI tagged board, it has all the ‘bling bling’s which one should expect.

If you are not in over clocking and only need it to be there when you need it, then this is definitely the right choice. At default clocks this board is completely stable and won’t be of any problem at all. In fact I really enjoyed its general performance in Vista ultimate Edition.
However when it comes down to number crunching thing, the board can hardly compete with P35 or even 680i for that matter.
Considering the fact that it’s just tagged 680i, I can easily confirm that this board will have BIOS updates, and therefore performance improvement is expected.

Over clocking has not really been the best experience. Packed with loads of over clocking options, the BIOS (0402) was begging me to over clock it to insane levels, but unfortunately it didn’t. I had to take the cell and reset the BIOS a couple of times to get it back to factory defaults and over clock it again
Considering the fact that the 3-way SLI setup is yet only supported by the 8800 GTX or the 8800 Ultra, establishing a 3-way SLI setup, with 8800 GTX/ Ultra would not only require a ton of cash but also a bigger/ more powerful PSU, thus making this solution not even remotely closer to the term known as “economical”.
If you own at P35 or 680i board, trust me you have got what it takes. Switching now is simply not recommended, unless you have loads of cash to throw.
if you are upgrading from a year old system or may be two, this board is an option, if I were you I would have waited long enough to see some other 780i based boards that are about to hit the market soon.

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