AM2 MBO Round-up: Part II - ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe
Author: Josip Brombauer
Date: 07 Dec 2006

ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe
Another one of the 570 SLI boards, this ASUS baby looks pretty much the same as other products bearing the Deluxe title: a black PCB, a copper heatpipe cooling solution for the chipset and MOSFETs, a variety of colours for the plastic parts on the PCB, including white, black, blue, red and yellow ? somehow it doesn?t look quite as classy as the DFI LanParty board. Apart from the 24-pin power connector there is also a 4-pin 12V one, though no molex. Power regulation is four-phase. Of note are the additional fan connectors on the board, there are six of them, which is quite nice. Considering this is a Deluxe board, we would expect to find power and reset switches on the board, but there are none. It seems such features are reserved for the top of the line boards only.
All the things we mentioned about the 570 SLI chipset in the Abit KN9 SLI review also apply here. This board features one more PCI slot than Abit KN9 SLI, three total. PCI-E slots remain the same. Six SATA ports are provided by the chipset, but there is also a JMicron JMB363 chip with two more SATA ports available, one of them present on the I/O panel for an eSATA device, right next to the FireWire port. Two Marvell gigabit LAN connectors are also there, along with audio jacks for the ADI 1988B 8-channel HD audio, both an optical and coaxial S/PDIF, PS/2 ports and a serial port.
Apart from the usual stuff like driver CD, manual, USB brackets and SATA cables, there are a couple of welcome additions in the bundle that we need to point out. One of them is the SoundMAX Superbeam microphone, and the other are ASUS Q-connectors for easy plugging of various case wires, such as power, reset, HDD LED, or additional USB and FireWire brackets.
The Award BIOS is quite adequate and gives a lot of options for fine tuning and overclocking your system. This board also failed to operate stable with 1T memory timings so we tested using 2T.