Whirlpool

Hi everyone,

Spent the last weekend helping a mate put together a new beast of a system. However, for the features advertised in the ASUS P5NSLi, there's a bit to be desired and a few weird things, so I thought I'd share them here for anyone considering this board.

First up, the good points.

Core 2 compatibility is a big plus, as it means you can use a cheaper (albeit hotter) Pentium-D processor now and then upgrade in the future whilst the Cores remain pin and chipset compatible (I'd imagine at least a year?). For this PC, a 3.2GHz P-D was chosen.

The layout is all fairly logical and sound. The inclusion of two PCI-E16 slots is welcome, as is the idea of spacing them far apart so that if you've got two vid cards they won't heat up too much in one area. This is particularly useful as I was fitting an nVidia 7950 GTX with the double-wide slot size for the heatsink and fan. That card is one fat thing, but at the benefit of being insanely fast.

The inclusion of four SATA drives was nice. They are all RAID-compatible, but I'll get to that in a sec. There's also four IDE drive slots, mainly for optical drives I would imagine. They are not RAID-capable.

There is no Firewire on this motherboard, so if that's important to you it's worth noting. No WiFi either, but I believe there is a more feature-packed version of this board that has WiFi and possibly a few other bits and pieces.

Overall, the board is pretty sound and generally good ASUS design.

However, there's a few quirks and weird things.

First up, forget RAID as bootable. Not gonna happen. The nVidia RAID controller is finicky and dodgy as. The driver disc is bootable and can create a RAID floppy disk (that's a big WTF for Windows XP there, the requirement of floppy disks for RAID drivers...) however it seems to copy the files fine - except the txtsetup.oem file is corrupted.

After being frustrated by the lack of working RAID (and the fact that I crashed the RAID setup a fair few times by trying things it obviously didn't like), I installed XP as a normal SATA to see what was going on.

The Windows XP version of the RAID driver disk seems to extract the txtsetup.oem file fine, although one of the other files was corrupted. I ended up using a combination of both disks to get RAID to at least be detected by XP setup. Then again, they may have just been dodgy floppies (despite me fully formatting them) so I'll give ASUS the benefit of the doubt.

Anyway, after trying to get RAID-1 to run, XP setup finally seemed happy and copied files across as it should. Upon next boot - missing NTLDR. I beg your pardon? In to the recovery console I went to investigate... nope, it's there. Big WTF, Windows? Okay, try running chkdsk. It fails at 25% through the third phase with an "unrecoverable error". O-kay.

In the end, I had to give up on getting RAID to boot. Through a combination of ineptly written RAID management from nVidia, poor drivers and XP's general dodginess about the whole thing, it simply refused to work. A friend informs me this is just a general malaise common to on-board IDE/SATA RAID controllers ;)

The only other weird thing I noticed was that the nVidia chipset on the motherboard got stupidly hot - like, give yourself a burn if you touch it for more than one second kind of hot. The heatsink is pretty big, but it's all passive - I'm worried about it to say the least. It made the base of the PCI-E16 slot warm and it was certainly heating up the DDR2 RAM pretty well. Everything seemed to be okay, but I remain cautious about its heat levels, despite the ASUS hardware monitor saying everything was acceptable.

Anyway, I'd give this board a 3 / 5 due to the problematic RAID setup and the heat issues. This may be resolved in the future. The rest of the board seems to do as it should.

If you've had any successful experience with IDE/SATA RAID, I'd be interested in hearing :)

DarkOwl writes...

The only other weird thing I noticed was that the nVidia chipset on the motherboard got stupidly hot - like, give yourself a burn if you touch it for more than one second kind of hot. The heatsink is pretty big, but it's all passive - I'm worried about it to say the least.

got you too eh? lol seems like most of us (who have bought the board) have fallen victim to it's nasty burningness. Maybe red things ARE hotter... :O

strange that it is so hot, yet all of my temperature guages say that the mobo is running at a rather cool 35 degrees....

i feel sorry for you about the RAID, it's a shame that it's not working for you. This board was the first one i have ever used to build a system from scratch, and i found it very easy to work with, with good design etc.

I have a couple of fans on my case, and boy is it bloody loud! not sure whether this is the double slot video card, or the fact that all of my 120mm fans are running as fast as the 80mm ones to keep the red thingy cool, but i really notice that this setup is a noisy bastard when compared with the volume of my old one.

anyway, bad luck about the raid, maybe new drivers/bios/something else will come out that will save you, and let you RAID your disks.

good luck in future,
steve

Agree, I've tried this bootable SATA Raid mirror over 10+ times and now
give up, everytime it gets corrupted after windows xp installs.
I can't be bothered to wait for new drivers either. Kinda dissapointing Asus
didn't test installing SATA Raid on the board before shipping.

Aside from red heatsink and SATA RAID I agree also that the rest works nicely.

Check other thread search 'nforce 570'

i was thinking about buying it. but now ive read this i have second thoughts. now i know why its cheaper than the p5b

After I expected it for 4 weeks I toke that mobo too and after 3 days it's gone.
When I start my pc in the 4th morning only the coolers was start to roll.
I try everything, RAM, video, CPU, all are fine but I don't have any image.
I even try my bios and it was working.
I have bad luck or what?

djunul writes...

I try everything, RAM, video, CPU, all are fine but I don't have any image.
I even try my bios and it was working.
I have bad luck or what?

maybe I don't understand you prob totally but does your video card have need an PSU plug to be connected to it. I've seen this before. BIOS fine but nothing else.

people seem to be having problems with it.

i must re-iterate myself. for low level FSB overclocking (ie. 300fsb) and most performance applications the board is exemplary.

It was easy to install, everything is located in convenient locations (particularly the big fat IDE cable ports, the Q-Connector is great, and i_LOVE_THIS_MOBO! it is TOPS!

i know a few of you have had problems with it, but i give it a 4/5 because it is so damn simple to get up and running. :)

i <3 this board!

My video card is "gigabyte 7600GT silent pipe II" and don't need PSU power.
And all sys work for 3 days. I didn't change anything in it.

djunul writes...

My video card is "gigabyte 7600GT silent pipe II" and don't need PSU power.
And all sys work for 3 days. I didn't change anything in it.

you sure it doesn't need a 6pin PCI-E power connector??!?!! i thought all 7600gt's needed 6pin connectors

I'm very sure!
Look on gigabyte site to see it (GV-NX76T256D-RH is his code)