Performance Summary: Asus' new P5ND2-SLI Deluxe, based on the new nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition chipset has proven itself to be serious powerhouse in our testing, bringing out some of the best all around performance we've seen from the Pentium 4 architecture to date.  The board routinely edged out the NVIDIA reference motherboard in most tests, as expected, and many times took Intel's new i955X chipset based board to task, especially in the gaming tests.  You simply can't argue with the consistently strong numbers this motherboard turned out when you look at it from all the angles we did in the We test labs.

When all was said and done, we would have to say that the Asus P5ND2-SLI Deluxe was an absolute joy to work with.  The board performs like a champ, overclocks as good if not better than any motherboard we've ever tested for the Intel platform.  Additionally its feature set is very well rounded, with Dual Gig-E, two SATA RAID controllers (one with SATA II capabilities and Native Command Queing), External SATA, SLI Graphics support, and the list goes on.  The only issues we see are the board's placement of its X1 PCI Express slots and the fact that the North and Southbridge heat sinks are a bit meager for our tastes, although admittedly we had zero issues relative to related stability in these areas.

With an introductory price of around $239-$249, the board is priced a bit on the high side (for now), but if you're considering making the jump to the new Intel platform architecture, PCI Express, DDR2 and all the other benefits of these latest technologies, the nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition chipset and the Asus P5ND2-SLI Deluxe motherboard may be a very exciting and rewarding way to go.  The only question remaining in the equation for us is will the nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition chipset also be compatible with the rumored forthcoming ATi Mutli-GPU technologies?  The jury is still out on this so we're told and that's a question for another day and story here at HotHardware.com.  For now, let's award the P5ND2-SLI Deluxe its just desserts - a big, solid 9 on our Heat Meter.

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