Asus's M2N32-SLI Deluxe Wireless Edition looks to be what happens when motherboard engineers spend a lot of time watching MTV's Pimp My Ride. The board beefs up NVIDIA's nForce 590 SLI reference design with a handful of extra peripherals, elaborate chipset and VRM cooling, and a couple of special goodies. Amazingly, Asus squeezes it all onto a standard ATX motherboard, albeit one with no available real estate to spare.

For the most part, Asus has done a good job arranging slots, ports and components on the M2N32-SLI. Some of the board's layout quirks are a little annoying, though. Take the power connectors, for example. The primary 24-pin power connector is nicely situated along the right edge of the board, but the four-pin auxiliary 12V connector is buried between the Wi-Fi riser and top PCI Express x16 slot. The plug's a pain to get to when a graphics card is installed, and its location creates additional cable clutter that can disrupt airflow between the CPU socket and an enclosure's rear exhaust fan.

Otherwise, there's a decent amount of room around the CPU socket for most aftermarket coolers. Wider designs may interfere with the board's taller VRM heatsinks, though.

Thanks to an elaborate system of heatpipes, the VRM coolers are also responsible for radiating heat from the board's north and south bridge chips. These passive coolers rely on a decent amount of airflow around the CPU socket and through the system's enclosure, so they may not be adequate for water-cooled rigs that move less air through the system. Asus includes a snap-on blower for the passive radiators in case your system's airflow isn't adequate to keep them cool.

Occasionally we'll see an extra Serial ATA port up by the CPU socket, but we've never seen one as far up the board as on the M2N32-SLI. One of the SATA ports fed by the auxiliary Silicon Image SATA controller is orphaned up in the top left corner of the board, about as far away from a standard enclosure's internal hard drive bays as you're going to get. The Silicon Image chip is stuck in this corner of the board to feed an external SATA port in the rear port cluster, and I guess trace length limitations prevent the internal port from being too far away from the chip.

Moving south, we run into the M2N32-SLI's generous array of expansion slots. In addition to the requisite pair of PCI Express x16 slots, the board is also fitted with PCI-E x1 and x4 slots, and a pair of PCI slots for older peripherals. Carefully-sculpted radiator fins and low-profile chipset coolers ensure plenty of clearance for longer graphics cards. Retention tabs on the PCI Express x16 slots are also easily accessible with double-wide graphics cards installed.

Asus neatly consolidates all six of the nForce 590 SLI's Serial ATA ports towards the bottom right-hand corner of the board. Unfortunately, when installed in the motherboard's secondary PCI-E x16 slot, longer graphics cards like the GeForce 7900 GTX block access to the lower two SATA ports. Four SATA ports should still be enough for most users, but it's annoying to lose a couple of ports to such a silly clearance issue.

Speaking of ports, the M2N32-SLI's port cluster is jam-packed with connectivity. Even an old-school serial port makes an appearance alongside more recent amenities, such as coaxial and TOS-Link digital audio outputs and an eSATA port.

Over to the right, you can see the antenna hookup for the board's integrated wireless networking component.

The Wi-Fi component is only available on "Wireless Edition" versions of the M2N32-SLI Deluxe, and it's the first Wi-Fi extra that we've seen attached directly to a board rather than bundled as an add-in PCI card. That limits your ability to move the Wi-Fi card to other systems, but it's still a pretty slick implementation.

Asus supplies the software necessary to run the M2N32-SLI's integrated Wi-Fi as a wireless access point, and also throws a nifty antenna into the box alongside a stereo microphone and auxiliary blower for the passive VRM coolers. The M2N32-SLI's most interesting extras are also its simplest, though.

A trio of jumper blocks for the board's internal front panel, USB, and Firewire headers is included that makes it much easier to hook the board up to a case's internal wiring. Simple extras like this probably cost only pennies to include in the box, but it's the thoughtful, little things that really stand out.