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ASUS P5N-T Deluxe nVidia nForce 780i SLI Motherboard Review
ASUS P5N-T Deluxe nVidia nForce 780i SLI Motherboard Review - PCSTATS
ASUS P5N-T Deluxe motherboard, one of Asus' AI Lifestyle motherboards which comfortably straddles the line between mid-range and high-end.
 75% Rating:   
Filed under: Motherboards Published:  Author: 
External Mfg. Website: ASUS Mar 05 2008   J. Apong  
Home > Reviews > Motherboards > ASUS P5N-T Deluxe

PCSTATS Maximum Motherboard Overclocking Chart & Conclusions

For nvidia SLI enthusiasts, the nForce 700 series is the last opportunity to mate a 45nm Intel socket 775 processor with multiple nVidia Geforce SLI-compatible videocards. This should make the nForce 780i chipset, and motherboards built on it, a worthy upgrade for existing nForce 680i users.

It's should, but it doesn't. Not that there's anything wrong with the nForce 780i chipset, it's just that nothing has really changed - yes, there's three-way SLI, and it conforms to the Enthusiast System Architecture specification, but aside from that there's no discernible difference in performance from the 680i chipsets enthusiasts just installed a generation ago.

The introduction of three-way SLI, while neat from a technophile standpoint, requires a disturbingly pricey investment. The cheapest card capable of running three-way SLI is the 9800GTX+, which currently retails for around $230, which means you have to buy $700 worth of video cards in order to max out a $225 CDN ($210 USD, £100 GPB) motherboard. This gets worse when you factor in the price of a 1200W power supply that can power three power-hungry video cards - that's another $400 to get your system up and running! Add in a case that can hold all those cards and keep them cool, and you're looking at well over a thousand dollars as the minimum price for a three-way SLI gaming system.

These ridiculous costs don't equal up to the performance gains they bring - few videocards scale linearly in SLI mode, and the results taper off even more when three videocards are trying to run at the same time. Much like the quad-crossfire rigs PCSTATS has tested, multiple GPUs can easily be bottlenecked and actually slow down system performance when compared to a single GPU solution. While some games do show a real benefit from more than two GPUs running together, the increase in performance is far from consistent.

So that leaves the Asus P5N-T Deluxe motherboard in a strange position. It's a well-designed, thoughtfully feature ladden motherboard, as PCSTATS has come to expect from Asus. It's three PCI Express x16 slots run in full x16/x16/x16 mode, though only two of the tripplet are PCI Express 2.0 compliant. Overclocking results with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 proved respectable, but not stratospheric.

However, since the ASUS P5N-T Deluxe's killer feature is three-way SLI is realistically too expensive for most enthusiasts to consider, and limited to too few videocards to make it a reasonable upgrade, it's hard to recommend the going down the ASUS P5N-T Deluxe all guns blazing. And if you don't, then its asking price of $225 compared against other dual-videocard SLI solutions based on the less expensive nForce 650i, 680i and 750i chipsets is a little hard to swallow. That, while coupled with the ASUS P5N-T Deluxe's average overclocking abilities and benchmark performance scores, means that nVidia SLI fans might do better for themselves by holding off till Intel Core i7 motherboards that support both SLI and Crossfire arrive en mass.

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< Previous Page © 2023 PCSTATS.com Motherboards Reviews...»

 

Contents of Article: ASUS P5N-T Deluxe
 Pg 1.  ASUS P5N-T Deluxe nVidia nForce 780i SLI Motherboard Review
 Pg 2.  Motherboard Highlights Photo Gallery
 Pg 3.  nVIDIA nForce 780i Chipset
 Pg 4.  Overclocking with ASUS on the nForce 780i
 Pg 5.  Motherboard Benchmarks: SYSmark 2007 Preview
 Pg 6.  Motherboard Benchmarks: SiSoft Sandra, Super Pi
 Pg 7.  Motherboard Benchmarks: 3DMark06, Quake 4, FEAR
 Pg 8.  Motherboard Benchmarks: FEAR, Super Pi
 Pg 9.  Motherboard Benchmarks: PCMark Vantage
 Pg 10.  — PCSTATS Maximum Motherboard Overclocking Chart & Conclusions

 
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