The Asus P5N32-E SLI retail package costs around US$274.99 - $299.99 for the US market and around €240 for Europe, making it an affordable solution for power users:

The package includes all information on the board's design and special features. Below is a list of what's included in the retail package:

• 1x UltraDMA 133/100/66 cable
• 1x FDD cable
• 2x SATA cables
• 2x SATA power cables
• 1x I/O Shield
• 1x printed user's manual
• 1x USB2.0 port module
• 1x 3in1 Q-connector
• 1x SLI adaptor
• 1x Serial port module
• 1x CD-ROM with InterVideo® Media Launcher (WinDVD Creator 2, InterVideo PhotoAlbum, DiscMaster 2.5 Platinum, DVD Copy 2.5 Platinum)
• 1x CD-ROM with drivers

The sound card is based on the Soundmax chipset and is an add-on card which needs to be installed.

There are 6 ports offered for up to 8 channels of output along with microphone and line-in.

The installation slot is right next the first PCI-E slot.

The board is densely packed with components but connections and slots are colour coded for easy identification.

Let's zoom in on the CPU area.

We can clearly see the passive cooling solution. As Asus comments "...The Heat Pipe design effectively directs the heat generated by the chipsets to the heatsink near the back IO ports, where it can be carried away by existing airflow from CPU fan or bundled optional fan...". Any nearby capacitors are low profile so there shouldn't be any problem with 3rd party (larger) cooling solutions. However, we noticed that with the passive cooling, the northbridge chipset still gets quite hot. Perhaps a fan here would help reduce the heat (and possibly help boost overclocking) although it would add to the noise.

The Asus P5N32-E SLI provides four banks for memory modules:

Moving to the southbridge, we can see a passive heatsink in use here as well. There are six SATA 2 connections in this region but are well clear of any components:

The Asus P5N32-E SLI supports Nvidia's SLI. There are 3x PCI-E x16 slots, two for SLI and one for a physics card. Both the blue PCI-E lanes work at the full 16x, while the white at 8x. There is plenty of space between the three PCI-E slots so no problems should arise with extra large VGA cards:

There are also several extra connections for USB, Front Panel Audio, COM2 and Firewire. Asus has include all port modules in the retail package. The back I/O panel has the usual connections:

• 1 x PS/2 Keyboard port(purple)
• 1 x PS/2 Mouse port(green)
• 1 x Optical + 1 x Coaxial S/PDIF Output
• 2 x LAN (RJ45) port
• 4 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports
• 1 x IEEE1394a port