In such a case the question will become: Can the PCI Express 8x offer enough bandwidth for PCIe 16x graphics cards perform at their peak?

The short answer is simply, yes the PCI Express can!

Truth is, having full 16x SLI support has no real performance benefits over an 8x SLI setup, so again this is something gamers are surely not going to miss out on.

A test was done involving the SLI GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards to the P5N-E SLI and compared it to the Striker Extreme and P5N32-E SLI (another more expensive 680i offering by ASUS) with the same hardware configuration. The results are very interesting as it somewhat equaled the more expensive board.

As everything you have on the PC sometime you need the motherboard, but you need to consider these components when buying a motherboard. If you have a lot of devices with a PCI interface that you wish to use, there is little point buying a motherboard that only offers you 3 PCI slots.

As expected for an ASUS board, the P5N-E SLI?s motherboard design lay out is very good, but not perfect. The southbridge has been left exposed without any form of cooling (although this is not much of an issue) and overclocking the P5N-E SLI may scare away some enthusiasts. The fan-less board design is an innovative. Its north bridge heatsink is very large though, allowing it to gather plenty of air-flow circulating around the case. Also the PCI Express slots were spaced far to each other unlike dual 8800 GTX boards

The Marvell 88E1116 controller is what drives the single on-board Gigabit LAN. Aside from having four internal SATA300 ports situated at the motherboard there is also a single eSATA port for portable hard drives.

The The ASUS P5N-E SLI?s 6-channel audio support comes from a Realtek ALC883 CODEC using audio sensing and enumeration technology. Plus it also has two Firewire (IEEE1394a) ports, one of which is located on the I/O panel. Besides these the P5N-E SLI includes a long list of ASUS brand features such as Q-Connector, O.C. Profile, Q-Fan2 and many others.

The features that have made PC?s so popular will never go away. Some people can live with a specialized appliance, and a lot of the PC market may shift to other products. However, many of us still want to have our own computer. The highest performance and newest software is likely to always be introduced first on the PC.

Tests were made in an attempt to learn what features and options could have been had been removed from the P5N-E SLI to cause such a difference in price. It was tested head to head with the ASUS 680i SLI and the results were astounding as it appeared that very little has been sacrificed when creating the P5N-E SLI.

P5N-E SLI boards are physically different and use NVidia chipset.s, they can give almost the exact performance. Though not very easy to configure, overclocking on the P5N-E SLI has been proven to be excellent and there remains a great potential for better results too.

Jon Caldwell is a professional content manager. Much of his articles can be found at http://everythingaboutpcmotherboard.com