Review: ASUS M2N32-SLI Premium Vista Edition Motherboard

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The ASUS M2N32-SLI Premium Vista Edition is a hard board to judge, really.

Being based on the solid foundation of the M2N32-SLI Deluxe turns out to be both its strongest asset and its biggest weakness.

For an extra £50 over the current asking price for the Deluxe you are getting a remote control, the ScreenDUO and a 512MiB flash drive, and you really have to wonder if the extra bundle is worth that.

Both the remote control and the ScreenDUO are interesting ideas in principle, but the remote is flawed due to a lack of functionality and over intrusive software, while the ScreenDUO is being pushed into a market where SideShow doesn't seem especially relevant. The average user will take it out the box, play with it for an hour or two, declare it the coolest thing ever and then most likely leave it to gather dust. Its lack of compliancy could well annoy as the list of Sideshow applications grows, as well.

The ASAP flash memory device is a more interesting idea, but the problem here comes from the lack of capacity. Microsoft recommends a 1:1 ratio of flash to RAM for ReadyBoost and anyone who's run Windows Vista with 512MB of memory will find that getting ReadyBoost support is the least of their worries. They probably also won't be buying a £150 motherboard...

Compared to the likes of a 1GiB Corsair Flash Voyager USB 2.0 its also a little on the slow side, offering a mere 14.3MB/sec compared to 17.8MB/sec for the Corsair.

So herein lies the problem. What you have is a fundamentally good board, but it is simply hard to recommend when for the same money you could buy the Deluxe, add on the cost in a 2GiB USB flash drive and an official Media Center remote and still be paying (slightly) less. You lose the ScreenDUO but you gain integrated 802.11g wireless; it may not look as cool but in terms of actual usefulness it's probably a fair trade.

Overall, then, an interesting product from ASUS but one which feels like it's trying to eke a little more profit out a 6-month-old SKU by riding the Vista bandwagon than one that really fulfils its potential. This feeling is reinforced by the reoccurrence of glitches that occurred during testing of the M2N32-SLI Deluxe, in the form of erratic performance when using SLI, and issues with both DTS audio and nTune.

Had ASUS made steps forward in genuinely improving the board over the Deluxe model, then the price premium would have been a slightly easier pill to swallow, even with the dubious value of the new bundled extras. As it stands, it's a hard product to recommend.

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