Asus's P5N32-SLI Premium motherboard
The nForce 590 SLI for Intel processors has arrived on Asus's high-end P5N32-SLI Premium motherboard. Be careful about confusing this board with the P5N32-SLI SE Deluxe, though. The Deluxe is based on Nvidia's older and apparently less premium nForce4 SLI X16 chipset, and given the differences between the chipsets, you don't want to end up with that instead of the 590 SLI.

Like most high-end Asus boards, the P5N32-SLI Premium is loaded with just about everything an enthusiast could want. The board even looks halfway decent, with Asus showing admirable restraint in not resorting to a clashing rainbow of neon multicolored slots and ports.

We're quite pleased with this mobo's power plug placement, as well. Both power connectors are located along edges of the board where cable clutter won't interfere with airflow around the CPU cooler or chassis exhaust. However, those looking to run upside-down cases like Antec's P180, which place the power supply below the motherboard, will probably require an extension cable to reach the auxiliary 12V connector.

The P5N32-SLI Premium relies on a silent array of heatpipes and radiator fins to cool its chipset components and CPU voltage circuitry. None of the heatsinks are tall enough to get in the way, so the board should easily accommodate the monster CPU coolers that are all the rage these days. It's fascinating how the same heatsink can appeal to both power-hungry overclockers and silence-seeking enthusiasts with little more than a fan swap.

An elaborate heatpipe network allows the P5N32-SLI Premium to get away with a low-profile south bridge cooler that won't interfere with longer graphics cards. Unlike with some high-end mobos, you don't have to worry about longer or double-wide graphics cards blocking access to any of the Serial ATA ports, either. All six ports are neatly arranged along the edge of the board where they'll be right next to the internal hard drive bays of most enclosures.

Unfortunately, longer graphics cards do interfere with the board's DIMM slot retention tabs. Removing memory modules while a graphics card is installed is a trying task for those of us with short, stubby fingers, and this particular clearance issue is surprisingly common on modern motherboards.

I'm inclined to forgive the tight DIMM tab clearance because the P5N32-SLI Premium provides such a bountiful array of expansion slots. With six slots in total, there isn't enough vertical room on a standard ATX board for more clearance.

One of the P5N32-SLI Premium's expansion slots is reserved for a proprietary audio riser that we'll detail in a moment, but the rest are standard fare. The blue and black PCI Express x16 slots each have access to a full 16 lanes of bandwidth, while the yellow slot stuck in the middle has only eight lanes of connectivity. Of course, PCIe x16 slots are also backward compatible with PCIe x8, x4, and x1 expansion cards. At the very least, you can use the P5N32-SLI Premium's third graphics card slot for one of the many PCIe peripherals we're all hoping will show up any day now. Until then, the board also has two standard PCI slots, one of which will still be free with a pair of double-wide graphics cards installed.

Asus gets a little fancy on the port cluster, serving up a pair of eSATA ports and antenna connector for the board's integrated 802.11g Wi-Fi component. The onboard Wi-Fi uses a Realtek RTL8187L wireless chip, proving that if the crab doesn't get you at the codec, it can still get you somewhere else.

The rest of the port cluster is less exciting, although we're pleased to see both TOS-Link and Coaxial flavors of digital S/PDIF output. These outputs support Dolby DTS Connect, which allows users to pass multichannel audio along a single digital connection to a receiver or to DTS-compatible PC speakers like Logitech's Z-5500s.

For those with more traditional PC speakers, the P5N32-SLI Premium's analog audio ports can be found on an external riser card that also plays host to the board's codec chip. This layout should help to isolate the codec from board-level noise and result in higher quality playback, but we've had mixed results from riser cards on other boards. We'll take a closer look at the riser's playback quality in a moment.

The P5N32-SLI Premium comes with a handful of extras, including a noise-canceling microphone, a Wi-Fi antenna, and an auxiliary blower for the passive chipset cooler to be used in water-cooled systems that lack ambient air flow. Those are great additions to the board, but the neatest extras are far less glamorous. Asus has started bundling a trio of little jumper blocks with its motherboards to take the hassle out of connecting individual pins. The front-panel connector block is particularly useful, since it allows you to easily consolidate a case's front panel cabling into a single block that can then be plugged directly into the motherboard. That's a lot easier than individually plugging each of the front panel connectors into the motherboard, especially when the board's already sitting inside a case.