As I lie in my room home, back from my dead end job at a grocery store I long for something entertaining to do, or at least something to keep myself from blowing my brains out all over my wall. So I decided to begin writing half assed reviews about my current computer hardware.
The most important part of a computer would most likely fall under the motherboard category, as it is connected to every component in your computer and a computer will not function without one. Today, I will be reviewing the board that I've had running for about 2 years now: The ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe
Here are some specs taken straight from ASUS's website
-Supports AMD Socket 939 Athlon 64FX/Athlon 64 X2/Athlon 64
- NVIDIA nForce4 SLI
- PCI Express Architecture
- SATA 3Gb/s
- Dual RAID
- Dual Gigabit LAN & AI NET2
- NV Firewall
- AI NOS™
- AI Audio (8-channel Audio)
It's pretty much your standard N-Force 4 SLI board with all the bells and whistles. 2 PCI-Express slots for the unnecessary dual video card setup you've always wanted (Note: When in SLI the two cards will be running 8 pipelines, not the full 16, thats what the A8N32-SLI is for). SATA that transfers at 3Gb/s for those lightning fast and horribly overpriced Raptor Drives. And of course NOS, the overclocking "tool" built into ASUS's newer boards for automatic overclocking.
Also comes with RAID capabilities, 2 onboard LAN ports, and onboard Audio from Realtek.
One of the features on this board that shows it's age would probably be the little card thing inbetween the two PCI-Express slots, its the thing that controls the SLI portion of the board. A lot of boards you can whether or not to turn SLI on in the BIOS, ASUS has this card thing and the option to set it in the bios. Why ASUS decided to go with this? I have no idea, just a little thing I found interesting:
Now that I've got all the stupid features out of the way, I'd like to talk about the BIOS that comes with the A8N-SLI Deluxe. Of course it comes with the first page showing you devices and that jazz.
Then there is the Onboard device stuff.
Now heres the good stuff, a pic of the timing settings for ram. This picture is what you get with the old BIOS, you are quite limited in what you can set. With the newer BIOS's from ASUS the timing screen becomes almost as large as a BIOS from DFI.
With the Jumperfree Configuration screen, you can set it to Automatic AI overclocking, NOS overclocking, and Manual. Both the NOS and AI overclocking settings only allow you to overclock up to 10 percent, while the Manual lets you have full control of CPU frequency up to 400mhz FSB, CPU voltage, DDR Voltage, CPU multiplier and PCI-Express clock.
Now its time to list the great things about this board. You can get this board for about 100 dollars new and 70 or less refurbished. On ebay or a trading forum you can even get this board for 50 dollars or under. The board has some great overclocking options in the BIOS, I tested the motherboard on its overclocking potential and its ran my Opteron 146 at 2.8ghz, and my 3800X2 at 2.7ghz. 800mhz and 700mhz over stock for both with small bumps in voltage. Lowering the multiplier on my CPU to the lowest allowed me to get the FSB to 350mhz! Quite a feat for any board. Here is a picture of my overclock with the Opteron 146 being stress tested:
With the good things about the board, there are always some very crippling things about the board. The chipset fan on the Deluxe is notorious for breaking prematurely giving off a very loud buzzing noise, ASUS will however replace it free of charge if it does happen to break. Older revisions of this board were also notorious for not even posting, I myself luckily only having to RMA it once to get a working board. Some people reporting on forums that 4 RMA's still yielded a broken board, but ASUS has fixed the problems and the dead boards were not that rampant anymore. Another fault of this board that will peeve enthusiasts would be the fact that you are unable to run 1T timings when the FSB is above 240 or more, but if you plan on having 1T timings and overclocking heavily, then the board for you would probably be the Premium version or the A8N32SLI.
Overall, other than the few bad things, I have loved this board and its been running rock solid and allowing me to overclock the crap out of my hardware for the past two years. For beginner overclockers and people who just want an SLI board, this would be a great choice.
One very important note so I don't get sued or an bad email. Pictures of BIOS were taken from PCper.com since I do not have a good quality digital camera to take pictures with, my future reviews will hopefully have my own pictures.