Asus P5ND2-SLI Deluxe

Asus’s recent boards have come in decent if unremarkable packaging.

Asus are true to form and you as always get masses of extras, more than any other manufacturer. Here’s a shot of everything that comes with this board…phew!

We spoke about the Abit board coming with a sata driver disk which is an excellent addition to the bundle, Asus take a slightly different route and provide a bootable driver CD which allows you to create 32bit or 64 bit driver disks…so you do end up in the same place, just by a slightly different method.

The board itself is very well designed; interestingly the P5ND2 follows the recent trend in Asus design by being completely fan less…the exact opposite of the Abit board.

Heat sinks cool the hotter components on the board and despite the Northbridge heat sink being quite large it doesn’t get in the way.

Connectivity on the P5ND2 comes in the form of 2 PCI Express 1x Slots, 3 PCI slots and 2 16x PCI express slots which can be configured for a single graphics card or SLI configuration. As with the AMD Nforce4 SLI boards from Asus the Intel version does need the EZplug connected to ensure perfect stability when running in SLI, a small price to pay for complete stability.

I/o panel connections feature the usual network, usb, ps2 and firewire connectors however where the board differs from just about every other board on the market is the placement of the silicon image SATA connectors. The first is just above the PCIe 16x slot, the second is next to the usb slots on the I/O panel and so provides an external sata connector as standard.

 

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