Asus M2N-E


The box of the Asus M2N-E is common for a motherboard, however unfortunately the bundle is also limited. Asus has the poorest bundle out of the three motherboards in this roundup, limited to the essential SATA and IDE cables, a manual and a drivers CD. There are no back panels for extra USB ports, no storage driver floppy disks, no rounded cables. The manual and the quick start guide are well written, but this won’t make the bundle any richer. We couldn’t help but wonder why Asus included 4 SATA cables where the motherboard supports up to 6 SATA devices.

Asus decided to use a black PCB for the M2N-E, which is uncommon since Asus usually build their middle range motherboards on a yellow PCB. The overall design and layout of the M2N-E is quite good and the SATA and onboard USB connectors are neatly grouped together.

The M2N-E has the most onboard fan connectors as well, which are a total of 6. The IDE connector is placed horizontally, but Asus fixed their past mistake and placed it slightly towards the inside of the motherboard, for those tight cases which don’t leave even a couple of millimeters more space than the ATX standard. We have an issue with the CMOS jumper ... while the jumper is easily accessible, it is placed right next to another jumper and that makes it hard to switch around, especially while the motherboard is installed inside a case.

The small chipset cooler is connected to the large copper MOSFET heatsink via a heatpipe. At the back panel of the motherboard you will not find a parallel port, but there is a serial port for legacy devices and this variation of the M2N series has no support for Firewire at all which might prove an issue for some.

Asus chose an Award BIOS for the M2N-E, they just tweaked it to their liking. Our feelings for the BIOS the M2N-E is using are mixed, while it provides an array of RAM settings and tweaks over four screens, the ranges of the CPU and RAM voltages are extremely low. You will only be able to set the CPU voltage up to 1.5625V and the DDR-2 voltage up to a measly 1.95V. 1.95V is not enough power for most high end RAM modules at their stock speed, to begin with. Hopefully a BIOS upgrade will provide a wider range of voltage options.

The Asus BIOS has two unique features as well, the Music Alarm and the Overclock Profile. The Music Alarm makes your PC a nice alarm clock, if you remember to put an audio CD in it. The PC doesn’t have to be turned on for this to work. The Overclock Profile allows you to save up to two BIOS configurations and restore them whenever it is necessary.