Conclusion

Layout and Features
The P5ND2-SLI Deluxe was every bit a high end ASUS board with a complete feature set comprising of dual Gigabit LAN, FireWire and dual SATA II RAID. What we liked about the board was the Sil3132 PCIe SATA II controller, a feature we missed on the A8N-SLI Deluxe, making the Intel platform P5ND2-SLI Deluxe a better-equipped board than its AMD counterpart. The board only looses out to MSI's P4N Diamond, which uses an onboard Sound Blaster Live! Instead of an AC'97 CODEC.

By now, it shouldn’t be surprising to find a decently designed ASUS board. However, the P5ND2-SLI Deluxe did come with some minor layout problems due to its large Northbridge heatsink. Some may also find the ASUS Two-Slot Thermal design a love or hate affair, depending on your priorities. Users looking to buy an SLI board will undoubtedly have plans to run SLI, but running SLI will render the two PCIe x1 slots in the middle unusable. While this is the logical expansion slot configuration to accommodate the SLI switch as well, it does present a dilemma when and if the need to have PCI Express expansion cards arise.

One of the things we were concerned about was graphic card compatibility. We experienced first hand an anomaly that arose during benchmarking where our Gigabyte GeForce 6600 GT would lose performance over time, dropping benchmark scores by over 20-30%. Flashing the latest BIOS available (0707) didn't help but switching to a different card seemed to solve the problem for us. We have confirmed that our Gigabyte card wasn't defective, which leads to a suspicion that it could be due to ASUS' PEG optimizations that aren't fully supported by every card.


Performance
The P5ND2-SLI Deluxe was a great performer but it wasn't the best overall as it was somewhat inconsistent in our subsystem and application-based benchmarks. Under our default DDR2-533 configuration, the board put a good showing some of the time standing ahead of its competition, but there were equally as many times when it chalked in slightly lower results. With an increase of memory bandwidth through DDR2-667 modules, which we first obtained during the testing of this board, performance across the board was further raised by another 2-3% on average. However, the P5ND2-SLI Deluxe showed its true colors during our gaming benchmarks, managing to elicit better overall performance under all resolutions than its nearest competitor all of the time. If you're the serious gamer, this is definitely the board to aim for. We were also quite pleased that the board managed to achieve our overclocking mark of 1250MHz FSB, though it required a moderate amount of tweaking to do so.

ASUS P5ND2-SLI Deluxe, a solid motherboard in with unmatched gaming performance.

From what we've seen so far, the P5ND2-SLI Deluxe chalks up another win for ASUS scoring strong on features with first-rate gaming performance. The P5GD2-SLI Deluxe is not only an excellent piece of gaming hardware, it is to the Pentium what the A8N-SLI Deluxe should have been for the Athlon. The board can be found retailing for US$233, a fair sum but definitely worth for its target user group. If only the board performed more consistently in all our tests and was free from the PEG link issue, the ASUS P5ND2-SLI Deluxe might have walked off with full marks.