ASUS P5N-D Motherboard

[JustaGeek]

ASUS Specifications.

Has anyone seen them in retail yet...?

Will it be as popular as P5N-E SLI...?

When will it reach the US...?

Currently available in UK and Australia, soon in Canada.



Finally available at Newegg!

 

[JustaGeek]

A few more pictures; no performance reviews that I could find yet.

Very impressive, massive NB heatsink, and a standard SB heatsink (unlike the P5N-E SLI, supplied without the SB cooler).

http://www.siliconmadness.com/...triker-ii-formula.html

http://xtreview.com/addcomment...2008-Motherboards.html

 

[JustaGeek]

The board is now available at Newegg!

 

[mrbill]

thanks for the update. I read your post and I just ordered one. I was trying to pick which p5n board to get, this one would would keep open the option for sli and it uses the newer 750i chipset.

 

[JustaGeek]

Great! Let us know how it performs.

Its predecessor, P5N-E SLI, which I own, has been a very stable board for me for over 1 year.

 

[Cookie Monster]

Finally. The 750i boards are released.. now for the other big name companies to release their 750i boards.

 

[mrbill]

Originally posted by: JustaGeek
Great! Let us know how it performs.

Its predecessor, P5N-E SLI, which I own, has been a very stable board for me for over 1 year.

I doubt I will be of much help to others. My friend will help me put it together and I don't think I will be doing any overclocking(don't know how). I already have the e8400, ocz sli ram, and 8800gt. Hopefully we will be able to set it to do dual boot off seperate HDD.

The only thing I wish the board had was esata connections. Ide support is nice, but I would have rather had more sata connectons.

 

[imported_Lipton]

Originally posted by: mrbill
thanks for the update. I read your post and I just ordered one. I was trying to pick which p5n board to get, this one would would keep open the option for sli and it uses the newer 750i chipset.

Any news? did you like it? How did it work out?

 

[JustaGeek]

Originally posted by: Lipton

Originally posted by: mrbill
thanks for the update. I read your post and I just ordered one. I was trying to pick which p5n board to get, this one would would keep open the option for sli and it uses the newer 750i chipset.

Any news? did you like it? How did it work out?

Any news, mrbill...?

 

[mrbill]

Sorry, I did not reply earlier. THe pcb has not arrived yet. I should get it on tuesday. newegg is SLOW...

 

[Cookie Monster]

Keeping an eye on this thread.

 

[Supercoolyo]

I ordered one too, seems to be working great! It's really solved every nitpick I had with the 650i P5N-E SLi, and the updates are definitely welcomed... I hated that the 650i mobo cooling was passive, and didn't have an attachment fan... Now it does. I hated that the P5N-E SLi didn't have holes on the side closest to the mobo connector and HDDs, made putting in cables and memory bend the board... Now there are mounting holes. I hated that it had that little SLi card in there for determining single or dual video cards... Now it's gone. I hated that it didn't have 7.1 audio (though I have an X-Fi), but now it does... WITH optical output... I hated that the southbridge didn't have a heatsink... Now it does... I hated that the old one had no support for PCI-E 2.0 or x16,x16 sli, now it does (or will with a BIOS update later)... I hated that it didn't support 45nm quads, but this one will with a BIOS update sometime in the near future... Anyway, everything that sucked about the P5N-E SLi has been fixed in my opinion... This seems to be a stable, matured version of a good board, which now makes it great. I definitely recommend it...

My box:
ASUS P5N-D 750i motherboard, Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz @ 3.0GHz, 2GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2-800 RAM, nVidia eVGA 8800GTS g92 512MB Graphics Card, Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB hard drive, Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty sound card.

 

[toadeater]

They left the almost universally useless and obsolete parallel and com ports. Everyone else is now putting them on optional headers. Could have been taken out and something else put there, like CMOS clear buttons or eSATA, or maybe even a small LED display.

The 4-pin power connector is in a bad spot if you have a case with the PSU on the bottom.

Audio is the budget 883 Realtek codec found on $70 motherboards. The 889A is much better. Asus is being really stingy here.

I'd wait for some other 750i boards, this one doesn't seem very exciting.

 

[mrbill]

My friend just fisnished putting this together for me. Everything would have have been extremely easy if it had not been for the antec 500w power supply failing about about 20 seconds. He pulled the MB to test it and then had to put it all back together.

The asus p5n-d had no problem with the e8400 chip. I worked great out of the box.

Vista 64 did not like the 4gb of sli ocz memory, so he installed it with 2gb and added the other 2 at the end and that worked with no problems.

The Motherboard had a conflict problem with the soundblaser audigy 2zs sound card. But after shutting down the ide channel, it was fine. My friend did not see a way to assign irq's so I guess thats a gripe with the board.

Dual boot worked fine. The only odd part was that the motherboard liked to boot on sata2. He had to swap the cables to make it boot on vista first.

I was going to drop in the bfg 8800gt, but newegg had the bfg 8800gts on sale, so I put in an old card until it arrives.

For me, I think the serial and parallel ports are a plus! I can use it with my old epson printer and I occasionaly use am eprom programmer.

My only gripe is not enough sata connections. 4 is not enough. 6 would be better.

 

[imported_wired247]

Question:

if you are running only 1 video card, is there any benefit to having this chipset over the X38? (all else being equal)

 

[mrbill]

I am going to run 1 8800gts for now. Then I will wait to see what a 2nd card will add. I am not a big believer in sli, so I probably won't keep a 2nd card( I think the best answer is always use the next gen video card). I went with this board to keep the sli option open.

I really can't be of much help with the x38. I have not owned one and I rally don't know enough to tell you what the difference would be. Also, I have never messed with overclocking and such. I probably will mess with this one a little bit later down the road..

I think if you read some posts on the x38 boards, the results will be better when using 2 video cards in 2.0. something about how the cards transfer data. So that might be a consideration. for you.

I have to think if your using an nvidia video card, using the nvidia chipset has to be better. Plus the p5n-d at $150 is about $50-$200 less than an x38 board. its also about $100-$200 less than the 780i choices out there right now.

 

[mrbill]

Allright, I need some help..

finally got the bfg 8800 gts card and after using the computer a bit, I has issues. For some reason the board is very happy with the 4 gig of ocz sli memory (2 sticks of 2) in windows xp mode.

But the board hates 4gb in vista 64 boot(2 hd 1 is set with xp the 2nd is vista). About 1 in 10 tries it will boot all the way in vista but it eventually will crash. If I pull 1 of the 2gb modules, it will run fine. Any ideas?

My friend updated the bios(had to plug in an ide drive, pcb did not like sata burner). He also downloaded the latest drivers from asus and soundblaster.

I don't know if this makes a difference, but The sounblaster zudigy 2 zs is installed and it looks like its working fine in both xp and vista boots.


Next up is install crysis. What is a good site/program to test the computers performance?

 

[j5150]

Wish I could help...

I will probably need some help of my own.

I have the p5n-d on order with 2 8800gts's, 4gb of OCZ SLI, a Q6600, a Samsung 500gb hd and a CoolerMaster 830 Stacker with a 1000w PSU, along with a few other parts. It all shows up tomorrow if UPS is on schedule. Then the fun begins. I guess I will see what fun Vista Ultimate has for me. If I am lucky I'll have Crysis loaded by ....... let's say Tuesday.......

 

[JustaGeek]

Did you install this update...?


Error message when you try to install Windows Vista on a computer that uses more than 3 GB of RAM: "STOP 0x0000000A"

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929777


EDIT: And definitely install the Service Pack 1, already available for Vista x64.

 

[j5150]

That update will help me tomorrow when I piece this machine together.

Thanks for the tip.......I am gonna need all the help I can get

 

[krnmastersgt]

Just out of curiousity j5150, did you order this on TigerDirect? CM Stacker 830 + 1k watt psu sounds like the Ultra X3, which I was considering buying

 

[j5150]

No....unfortunately. I wanted the Ultra X3 but the 830 comes with the CM ProPower 1000.
I liked the modular design of the X3 but was having trouble finding cases that would fit it without case mods and were in my price range
I did get some of the items and the case from Tiger Direct. It all showed up an hour ago. Just waiting to get off work to start piecing it together. Wish me luck. Damn Vista........

 

[j5150]

It's up.....and running!!!!!!

 

[mentaldemise]

Well, I have this board with a q6600 (Quad Core 2.6's) And 4 gigs of GSkill DDR2-800. The memory has no problems running at 1000 mhz, which is pretty nice. THe problem is overclocking the CPU. In order to get anything nea 3.0 I have to alter either the NB Voltage or the HY Voltage. In Bios these voltages aren't set, it's auto or you have to manually set them. No incrememnting. And without knowing the default voltages it can be slightly dangerous. At any rate, I'm not sure what the issue is but no matter what I set those voltages to there isn't any stability. I can run at 100% CPU load on all 4 cores and not get hot. But I get random reboots. I need to look into the PSU but it doesn't have any problems functioning at 10% oveclocking. Also, the tools that come with the board are messed up. If you install the AI overclocking thing or w/e it overrides what windwos does with the APCI functions. And really screws windows up. No idea what the other dude was talking about Vista bitching about 4Gigs of memory, I had no problems. And if it wanted to boot off the second SATA drive it was because the MBR was there. Or you had that one set in bios. None the less, there are two BIOS updates for this already, not that they did a whole lot. The BIOS update feature is really nice, you can put the .bin update file on a flash drive and it mounts it for you. At any rate, if anyone finds out another solution to getting the q6600 to goto 3.0 and be stable please hit me up. I don't usually do forums so email me at mental@mental-x.net Thanks.

 

[JustaGeek]

For those having issues here is the link to ASUS forum:

http://vip.asus.com/forum/topi...=P5N-D&SLanguage=en-us