AM2 MBO Round-up: Part VI - ASUS M2N-E
Author: Josip Brombauer
Date: 15 Dec 2006

ASUS M2N-E

The second ASUS board tested today carries a more recent chipset, the nForce 570 Ultra. At first glance, it looks like one of the Deluxe boards, because of its black PCB and the copper, heatpipe-integrated heatsinks. A 4-pin 12V power connector is required in addition to the 24-pin one. A potential issue we?ve noticed about the layout of the board is that if you have a two-slot graphics card (such as our 7900 GTX) installed in the PCI Express x16 slot, you will not be able to use all of the six available SATA ports since the card will be blocking access to at least one of them. There is also one PCI Express x4, two PCI Express x1 and three PCI slots present, along with an IDE controller for two devices.
On the backpanel you can find four out of ten supported USB 2.0 ports, one gigabit LAN port, two PS/2 and a serial port, a coaxial S/PDIF and six audio jacks for the SoundMAX 7.1 HD audio (ADI AD1988). Since the board falls into the AI Lifestyle line-up, you also get these ASUS AI features: AI Gear (predefined profiles for CPU voltage and frequency), AI Nap (snooze your PC without stopping operation), ASUS Crystal Sound noise filter, AI NOS (dynamic overclocking system), etc.
No additional brackets are supplied, not even the Q-connectors - just the manual, driver CD and cables.
Again, no luck with the 1T setting, so 4-4-4-12-2T is what we tested on.