Hardware Review
ASUS A8N-SLI
The emergence of SLI and Dual core CPU technologies, the selections for motherboards has been plenty. Different offerings from different manufacturers can somewhat be confusing if you are just starting out to become an enthusiasts. ASUS has always made excellent motherboards. The features of selections they have also are very well integrated with their platform solutions. Tonight we'll take a look at ASUS' nForce 4 and SLI capable motherboard, A8N-SLI.
As one NVIDIA's newest platform, the NFORCE4 has found a huge market with the PC enthusiasts. With the nForce 4, ASUS implemented the SLI capability to the A8N-SLI. For people who still aren't aware what SLI is, SLI is basically a technology which bridges two identical PCI express SLI specific video cards to essentially doubling the graphics performance of a system. It is similar to 3DFX's double video card solution during the late 90's.
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Let's take a more in depth look at the A8N-SLI. The A8N-SLI supports AMD's Athlon 64/FX socket 939 CPUs. It also has support for the newer AMD Athlon X2 dual core CPU's. For the memory, the A8N-SLI supports dual-channel un buffered DDR400 memory. There are two x16 PCI Express; one is used for single VGA mode and the two for SLI mode at x8, x8 each. There are also two PCI Express x1 and three regular PCI slots. All nForce4 based SLI solutions comes equipped with a card Asus call "EZ Selector" in which a SODIMM type card is placed in between the primary and secondary PCI Express slots. By switching the position of the EZ Selector card from the "Single Video Card" to "Dual Video Cards", the PCI Express lanes between the two x16 slots are split into two with each slot receiving 8 lanes respectively.
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There is a good bundle of accessories the A8N-SLI comes with. It comes with all parts you would need to use pretty much every feature this board has from SATA cables, header connectors and with the SLI bridge chip to enable SLI mode.
The A8N-SLI sports four SATA connectors as well as two UltraDMA channels. This board also has RAID support for RAID, RAID1 and 1+0. The A8N-SLI has a couple of cool feature that I do find very useful, AI NOS and AI NET2. AI NET2 basically is a diagnostic tool to detect your LAN connection before your OS boots up. It's very helpful utility to check any connection problem with your LAN via a faulty network cable. AI NOS is also a gamer’s utility. If you are a serious performance tweaker, this tool makes overclocking more simplified. The great advantage of AI NOS is detects when power is much needed for any 3D applications or any other software that requires very high system resources. For audio, the motherboard uses the Realtek ALC850 chip which gives you an 8-channel CODEC.
The BIOS for the A8N-SLI is very easy to navigate. You can easily enable or disable all devices built into the motherboard. Thought the memory timing controls are a bit lacking, ASUS did proved the most important ones with CAS latency, TRAS, TRCD AND TRP settings.
ASUS has always been well known to be a very solid motherboard manufacturer. The A8N-SLI follows that very trend. While supporting the newer PCI Express technology with the SLI, ASUs also packed the A8N-SLI with tons of features that a newbie and even an enthusiast would find very useful. The price for the board is also very good. At just $150 CAD, it's very well priced for an entry level SLI system. Overall, I give the ASUS A8N-SLI a score of 8 out of 10 gears and our solid Recomendation. If you have anymore questions regarding this review just visit ASUS' web site for more information or feel free to discuss it in our forum.
