Core 2 motherboard overclocking roundup

ASUS P5N32-E SLI Plus

Price $349 Street Price $338 Supplier ASUS Website www.asus.com.tw
Chipset 680i + C55 Max CPU voltage 1.6 Max DDR voltage 3.425

The P5N32-E SLI is ASUS’ mid-level stab at the 680i. Unfortunately there’s one thing holding the board back – the northbridge gets amazingly hot, and needs active cooling in order to overclock. Even more unfortunately, it doesn’t come with active cooling, so we used a high-powered 120mm fan to cooling the NB and get the overclocking result we did.



EVGA 680i SLI

Price $430 Street Price: $419 Supplier Shadow Website www.shadowentertainment.com.au
Chipset: 680i + C55XE Max CPU voltage: 1.8 Max DDR voltage: 2.5

This is the reference 680i board, and it’s still excellent. Interestingly, it is now being outperformed by second generation 965 boards in the overclocking stakes. A reset and power button onboard make this nice to deal with, but the battery is a bugger to remove. Definitely the board to get if you need SLI – otherwise we’d suggest one of the new revision P965s.



ASUS P5N-E SLI

Price: $229 Street Price: $219 Supplier: ASUS Website: www.asus.com.tw
Chipset: 650i Max CPU voltage: 1.6 Max DDR voltage: 2.517

The P5N-E SLI was one of the more interesting beasts in the roundup. As the only 650i board on the market, we can see why NVIDIA wanted to turn all attention to its older brother. The SLI hardware switch makes an unwelcome return, and a very basic BIOS and ordinary overclockability makes this one hard to recommend.