The Asus P5N32-E SLI Plus retail package costs around €120 - 165 in Europe. In contrast, the Asus P5N32-E SLI is only €145~195. The retail package is more or less the same with both motherboards:

Below is a list of what's included in the retail package:

• 1 x SLI bridge
• 1 x ASUS Q-Connector Kit (USB, 1394, system panel; Retail version only)
• 1 x UltraDMA 133/100/66 cable
• 1 x Floppy disk drive cable
• 4 x SATA cables
• 2 x SATA power cable for 4 devices
• 1 x 2-port USB2.0 module
• 1 x IEEE1394a module
• User's manual

The sound card is based on the Soundmax chipset and needs to be installed.

There are 6 colour-coded sound ports.

The sound card's installation slot is located right next to the first PCI-E slot. Just plug the card in and your ready to go.

The board is a nice clean design and all parts can be identified easily:

Let's zoom in on the CPU.

We can clearly see here the passive heat pipe cooling solution for the northbridge. As Asus comments "...The Heat Pipe design effectively directs the heat generated by the chipsets to the heatsink near the back IO ports, where it can be carried away by existing airflow from CPU fan or bundled optional fan...". The nearby components are low profile so there shouldn't be any problem with larger, 3rd party cooling solutions. However, the northbridge gets quite hot. Perhaps, Asus should have installed an active cooling solution to reduce overall heat, especially during overclocking.

The Asus P5N32-E SLI Plus has four memory slots.

Moving to the southbridge, we can see the passive heatsink and the 6x SATA 2 connectors, well organized, not crowded:

The Asus P5N32-E SLI Plus supports Nvidia SLI. There are 3x PCI-E x16 slots, two for SLI (blue) and one for physics card (white). Both blue PCI-E lanes are working at full 16x, while the white at 8x. There is plenty of space between the three PCI-E slots, so no problem there with extra large VGA cards:

There are extra connectors for USB, Front Panel Audio, COM2 and Firewire on the back. Asus has include all port modules in the retail package. The back I/O panel has the usual connections:

• 1 x PS/2 Keyboard port(purple)
• 1 x PS/2 Mouse port(green)
• 1 x Optical + 1 x Coaxial S/PDIF Output
• 2 x LAN (RJ45) port
• 4 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports
• 1 x IEEE1394a port