Review: Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe Wireless Edition AM2 motherboard

Based around AMD's AM2 socket, the M2N32-SLI Deluxe Wireless Edition is the flagship board in Asus' current line-up of boards based on Nvidia's new Nforce 590 SLI chipset.

Incidentally, the standard M2N32-SLI Deluxe is the board AMD is supplying with many of their press kits for the AM2.

This board from Asus supports all current AM2 CPU's from the FX-62 down to the new range of Semprons with support for 800/667/533MHz DDR2 memory and four Dimm slots for up to 16GB of memory.

Once you've opened the box and made your way through the pile of extra goodies supplied with the board, the first thing that strikes you about the M2N32-SLI DWE is the fancy heat-pipe cooling solution Asus has used.

This keeps the chipsets, Mosfets and capacitors cool in the 8-phase power design, which is an Asus technology that runs 15c lower than standard power designs.

As you've probably guessed by the 32-SLI part of the name, this board has two full-speed x16 PCI Express slots that will ensure high frame rates once you get your SLI graphics setup installed.

At first glance the board doesn't seem to offer anything special in the way of expansion with two PCI slots, an x1 and an x4 PCI Express slot. However, most of what you need is already integrated into the board.

You get dual Gigabit Lan, 8-channel audio via a Soundmax ADI chip and an 802.11b/g wireless module.

When it comes to storage, if you have a bundle of Sata (Serial ATA) disks lying around you will be very happy with the six Sata 3Gbits/sec ports. However, if you are still using the older ATA discs, you will be disappointed to find just a single ATA/133 port.

The six Sata ports can be configured into Raid arrays via the onboard Nvidia Mediashield Raid controller, which supports Raid 0, 1, 0+1, 5 and JBOD (Just A Bunch of Disks) arrays.

As if this wasn't enough, there are two additional Sata 3Gbits/sec ports – one internal, one external – which are controlled by a Silicon Image Sil3132 controller that supports Raid 0,1 JBOD as well as SOTG (Serial ATA On The Go) for the external port.

As we've come to expect from high-end Asus boards, the M2N32-SLI Deluxe Wireless Edition is loaded with features and offers good support for the new AMD/Nvidia technologies at a surprisingly low price.

We'll be posting full performance results in the coming days on the Test Bed's Report Labs service.

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