ASUS P5N32-SLI Premium Wi-Fi AP

Floating in the nether region of the 965/975 and the 680i.

The fabled 590 for Intel is finally here! Too bad it’s far too late, having already been superseded by the 680i. Although we’re assured that the 590 won’t be leaving the market any time soon, we have a tough time believing anyone would select this over the 680i, especially considering the latter’s 1333MHz FSB/1200MHz DDR2 support. Heck, even ASUS has its own 680i boards coming very soon.

Interestingly, despite all the comments circling around that the 590 isn’t as good an overclocker as the 680i, this ASUS 590 board managed to push our X6800 up to the same 3.7GHz ceiling as the EVGA 680i. As far as benchmarks, just turn back a few pages to the newer board – they’re exactly the same.

The BIOS is lacking the memory ratio options of the 680i, but does sport the asynchronous memory/FSB clocks. While the BIOS isn’t a patch on the standard NVIDIA offering, it certainly does the job.

Layout-wise the board is very obviously the precursor to 680i, right down to the extra distance between the PCI-E x16 slots. There is only one major issue – the IDE port sits directly behind the 24 pin power connector and causes a fair bit of grief. As an added nicety, all the SATA ports have been rotated to be parallel with the board.

The board is passively cooled, however, it gets quite hot – you may wish to use the optional heatsink fan included.

We’ve always been dubious of the value of the included Wi-Fi with these boards – at this stage there’s no sign of an equivalent board without either, and we really don’t expect to see one.

The P5N32-SLI Premium is a good board – however, it’s also an anachronism that
will likely get lost in the shadows of its newer cousin.