** The Official ASUS P5N-E SLI & Ultra 650i Thread **

Looking at buying a board for a c2d chip in the next couple of weeks (waiting for a release date on the E6320). Anyway with the Gigabyte DS3 on this week only for £82 and this one for £88, i'm stuck on which one to get. I know the DS3 has got good reviews with overclocking and being a good board, but this one sounds like it could be decent as well and looks a little nicer being black ;) . Will be running with a X1950 Pro and 2GB of 6400, but again not sure which brand to go for. Anyone know of any problems between the Asus and ATi cards?

Which one you reckon i should go for? :)
 
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drak3 said:
Can anyone please list the difference between 650 and 680?
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650i
only supports dual x8 SLI operation, single Gigabit Ethernet, four SATA 3Gb/s ports, and eight USB

680i
dual x16 SLI slots ,another pcie 16x slot running @ 8x perfect for an areca 1220 raid card, dual Gigabit Ethernet with teaming, six SATA 3Gb/s ports, and ten USB 2.0 ports & linkboost features

if you use an areca 1220 raid card or thinking of getting 1
your graphics card will fall back to 8x when shared with raid card thats why the 3rd slot is an advantage if you wanna run extenral raid cards ;).
 
ok so ROUGHLY its all about a raid card, another ethernet (never used 2 on same pc in my life :p) and a number of USB ports that even with 2 USB connections for each of the stuff a pc needs you wont use them all?

ps: sounds dumb to me
 
drak3 said:
ok so ROUGHLY its all about a raid card, another ethernet (never used 2 on same pc in my life :p) and a number of USB ports that even with 2 USB connections for each of the stuff a pc needs you wont use them all?

ps: sounds dumb to me
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its all about the bandwith on the pcie lanes
iam pretty sure a 8800gtx needs full 16x
to run, 2 8800gtx would need 32 lanes + you could
still run a raid card @ full speed in middle slot
 
I see, then there is a point spending the extra money for the 680 board. However, do you need 2x16 on lower resolutions? or the 2x8 of this board will be enough?

ps: I am trying to decide if I ll buy one btw :p
 
This review says 16x sli is needed for 8800 cards at extremely high res http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=4450&s=4


Anything else should be fine with 8x



I noticed this board does not overclock the pci-e automatically like its big brother. Is there any harm in setting it to 125mhz as I have a nvidia card ?

I presume there are proper locks on this board, I have a pci sound and raid card that I dont want to overclock as well as the normal ide channels of course

The asus probe software on the cd doesnt seem to be much good..
 
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silversurfer said:
I noticed this board does not overclock the pci-e automatically like its big brother. Is there any harm in setting it to 125mhz as I have a nvidia card ?

I presume there are proper locks on this board, I have a pci sound and raid card that I dont want to overclock as well as the normal ide channels of course
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I'm running mine at 125 with a pair of 7900GTO's and I've had no issues. The RAID array has fallen over twice though, but I suspect that that is down to bad (very small) cluster size choices on my part.
 
ArchAnGeL said:
shall we just say I wish it was a bit cheaper :)
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Ah, but you have to pay for the support. Now that OC_A64 and I have proven what a cracking bargain of a board it is and have drummed up huge demand, OcUK are here to meet that demand. Yes, it's a couple of quid more expensive than you'd hoped, but then everyone else is looking for £115 for a 650i board - and they've not got any.

And it still looks like bargain of the century compared to the Abit 680i board ;)

For £88 you won't get a more flexible gaming board. I'm running day-in, day-out at 3.6GHz 100% CPU utilization on both cores. Because of the asynchronous RAM speeds you don't need fancy RAM, but if you've got fancy RAM you can take full advantage of it. And you can run 2 graphics card in SLi to give your ePenis a boost in 3DMark '06.

It also seems to clock E6300's and E6600's equally well so whether you want to build a bargain basement clockmonster or a slightly more upmarket gaming rig, I think this board has a lot to recommend it.
 
Its a good price. I do wonder if the price will drop to 50 in say a years time but thats mainly down to nvidia I guess. I heard someone talk about the ds3 selling for $100 :eek:

WJA, Ive run mine at 125 too with no apparent issues but I did have problems yesterday with my hard drive but I think that could be because its 7 years old and needs replacing rather then any problem with locks

I'm keeping my cheapo ram at stock while I clock the rest up again to see what happens. The board isnt async exactly so increases in performance wont be linear imo.
Also speedfan is reporting the cpu temp as 15c below what coretemp says, can speedfan be relied on is there anything better maybe?

Heres my speedfan graph for stock vcore with +.1mv under orthos, doesnt seem as bad as the asus with 805 was
vcore25ghz1mvspeedfannp5.jpg
 
WJA96 said:
Ah, but you have to pay for the support. Now that OC_A64 and I have proven what a cracking bargain of a board it is and have drummed up huge demand, OcUK are here to meet that demand. Yes, it's a couple of quid more expensive than you'd hoped, but then everyone else is looking for £115 for a 650i board - and they've not got any.

And it still looks like bargain of the century compared to the Abit 680i board ;)

For £88 you won't get a more flexible gaming board. I'm running day-in, day-out at 3.6GHz 100% CPU utilization on both cores. Because of the asynchronous RAM speeds you don't need fancy RAM, but if you've got fancy RAM you can take full advantage of it. And you can run 2 graphics card in SLi to give your ePenis a boost in 3DMark '06.

It also seems to clock E6300's and E6600's equally well so whether you want to build a bargain basement clockmonster or a slightly more upmarket gaming rig, I think this board has a lot to recommend it.
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I'm not knocking what a good board it is and you guys have done a great job looking at it but that price just means I will end up buying it elsewhere.
I am not really criticising ocuk as they are in the game to make money, but like any other consumer, I am in the game of saving money.
 
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