I can't overclock past 220 HTT on this board. I can skip all errors on boot to go over the 220 HTT but it will revert back to default settings when I am in windows (yes.. very strange).


what a horrible board. im thinking of RMAing and just going with a DFI nforce 4 board.

/sigh

With all due respect, Asustek has taken a big shit in recent years. They are not the excellent company they once were. If you check any number of online references including Asus' own website forums you will discover they have released one POS after another for the past three years including both Nvidia and ATI chipset mobos for both AMD and Intel CPUs.

All you need to do is measure the vcore voltage fluctuations, confirm the PC3200 industry standard memory incompatibilities, see the improper BIOS options and constant reboot error messages on Asus mobos to understand that they no longer employ any competent mobo engineers. This isn't just my opinion, these problems are documented all over the Net by countless people. Asus' response is to ignore the problems and their customers. This will result in Asus' own downfall and they will take Gigabyte with them no doubt.

Asus, DFI and Abit may be the mobo enthusiasts current wet dream but none of them have delivered a properly functioning mobo in recent years. Your experience with the two new Asus mobos is quite typical and totally UNACCEPTABLE. My guess is Tyan is gonna put all of these clowns out of business real soon.

MSI never been good at overclocking? You must have missed the K8N Neo4 Platinum :) I've never found MSI's to be particularily NICE to overclock (usually some obscure settings somewhere that require tweaking) but they can be made to go very fast, especially with their NF3/NF4 boards.

Used to like ASUS until I had two of their boards fail on me (not even overclocked). To make it worse, they refused to honor the warranty because the retailer I had bought them from had gone under. 3 year warranty, yeah, right. Based on this (and other non-RMA problems I've had with their boards) and other people's reports, I'd say ASUS is hardly the best motherboard manufacturer any more. Not as bad as ECS, but heading that way.

wasn't there some chipset feature on the 590SLI that it was built for overclocking, said so in the roadmaps, and there wasn't no such feature on the 550 and 570 series chipsets.
take a look at the comparison chart at the bottom of this page.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/chipsets/display/xpress3200 -nforce590sli_5.html
the "Max Overclock" (5th row from the top) is only on the 590. maybe they disabled any decent o/c on the 570 chipset

maybe the problem isn't ASUS, but nVidia chipsets itself so that only the premium chipset overclocks and not the 570 ones.

I've had this board for over a month and I've been fighting with it and Asus Tech Support for the entire time.

I'm really surprised that the reviewer did not mention the false advertising Asus has done on the M2N-E. On Asus's website, this board is advertised as have 15 vDIMM steppings, but, in reality, there's only 4 (1.80v / 1.85v / 1.90v / 1.95v) - which is bad news for overclockers and for anyone who wants to run a 2.1v DDR2 800 DIMM.

According to the website, we should get up to 2.50v, but Asus tech support in the USA wasn't even aware of the problem when I called two weeks ago, and now they're telling me to e-mail engineering in Taiwan, which I've already done twice. I received responses from Asus's 'Engineering' Dept. that told me the RMA procedures, and who to contact if I need a replacement chipset fan (which the M2N-E doesn't have).

The reviewer nailed it, though - Asus dropped the ball here, and doesn't seem to even be acknowledging that it's on the ground.

It's about time we got some reviewers to bring these issues to light - maybe, when faced with a hit to their reputation and sales, Asus will support the product they have falsely advertised.

I'm here to stick up for Gigabyte. I've had excellent overclocking success with their boards.

The new Conroe chips overclock great on the Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 which is cheaper than anything from ASUS.

For a low budget AM2 build I used a Gigabyte GA-M55PLUS-S3G. It was dead simple to overclock an Athlon64 3200 from 2000 MHz up to 2900 MHz in Windows and it was Prime stable for 24 hours at 2809 MHz. It overclocked like this using the on baord integrated graphics so I'm sure with a separate graphics card it might overclock even better.

I'm presently using my Gigabyte K8NS-Pro socket 754 board. My Athlon64 goes as high as 2950 MHz on air and it's Prime stable up to 2700 MHz. The similar nForce3 board from ASUS had the CPU voltage locked at default which is not very friendly for an overclocker.

ASUS does make some great boards but I also think they rely too much on their name and don't put enough into some of their mid-range offerings.

Gigabyte may not produce the ultimate overclocking motherboards but with a little effort you can usually get pretty damn close. When it comes to overclocking they're certainly nowhere near the bottom of the barrel.

It's funny how you should slag off Nvidia chipset, since for a long time now, they've been the foundation of success for AMD systems.

ATI chipsets don't even compare.

With all the respect, you should have browsed the web before reviewing the M2N-SLI board. You would find that when overclocking over 220MHz, the board would always hang after the first reboot. If you don't get any beeps, it's just a cold boot. Just hard reboot it again, when you get the error message, either continue or enter BIOS and save the settings again and the next time it will boot. Mine is currently at 300 MHz, stable as hell. Great mobo for it's price with some quirks.

Here is my top result with M2N-E :

http://valid.x86-secret.com/show_oc.php?id=115706

Rock stable at 2920Mhz ( 8 X 365 ), only problem is that it has to be hard rebooted. With soft reset it forgets the bios settings and you have to reenter bios and save&exit.

Bios version 0304.

Is it possible to force flash the M2N-SLI bios in M2N-E ? The reviewer said that he swaped bios chips and that it worked. Did he try to raise the memory voltage, and did it work ? I tried to mod the M2N-SLI Bios so that M2N-E would allow flashing, but ended up with bad flashes (twice). Fortunatly I was able to recover them with builtin protection (bootblock) of Award bios. Anyone has any ideas ?

Have they made this work yet?

not everybody is an overcloacker

Real (business) people with real money consider buying a motherboard which can deliver the best performance without the need to overcloack. You might want to cover motherboards from this perspective as well.

I have successfully force flashed a ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe to my M2N-E. I then had access to all settings that M2N-SLI has, dont know if all the settings works but they were available in BIOS at least. It didnt solve the soft reboot problem with this board so I flashed it back to M2N-E BIOS.

The BIOS 0402 for M2N-E solved the restart problem when overclock. Now, I'm running at bus 330 with Sempron 2800+, stable like rock!

Don't worry when buy this board !

Very informative.

Ive had nothing but good results out of nforce.
I have though stopped purchasing Asus boards and that has solved many of my computer problems.

Just for your information taken from http://www.aopen.nl/tech/techinside/HD%20Audio.htm

The Introduction
The PC nowadays is more than a computing platform but a versatile platform for digital- media applications such as DVD-Audio, streaming music, and home theater. For high-quality audio performance, the audio architecture and infrastructure implemented on PC will surely plays a decisive role. Intel® High Definition Audio (HD Audio), developed by Intel Developer Forum, is expected to replace the aging AC”97 specification and offer a more flexible, dynamic and cost-effective on-board solution for truly top-notch audio effects.

The benefits of HD Audio
HD Audio (code-named as Azalia) architecture is capable of delivering sound stream through up to 8 channels at 192 KHz/32 bit; whereas AC’97 could only supports 6 channels at 48 KHz/20 bit. The increased bandwidth will bring end users glitch-free audio experience for any critical audio functions.

Besides, HD Audio architecture could also deliver two or more different audio streams to different CE (consumer electronics) devices simultaneously. The multi-streaming feature allows end user to play back two or more different sound tracks with the same PC at the same time. The illustration (from Intel) below indicates that one user could play music (CD) in the study room; meanwhile the other one could watch film (DVD) in the living room without interfering with each other.

Sorry, I forgot to say the above is what ADH, and the ADH Connector are for!

My Bad. Great Review though.

I have the same motherboard only that it has nforce 4, thus being called m2n4-sli. I have the same problems! The message with SLI, the second card being removed appear, i cannot oc the cpu too much and I cannot set ddr2-800 because of the low voltage!
I really don't know which is the problem!

I appreciate the review and everything; let me know what type of RAM to get for this thing specs for the bios, etc. However, it seems like most if not all of the issues with the board revolve around OCing. I want to build a comp (first time) and I do not want to OC. I didn't catch wheather or not the author said the board works under normal conditions. I just want to know if the ASUS M2N-E works period; I could really care less for all of the bells and whistles.

Thanks

Wow