ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe

Rounding things up:

This motherboard is another great board from ASUS in many respects, but there are some short falls that really need mentioning. Many enthusiasts will not like the layout. If you're looking to use the PCI slots and SLI - the primary reason why we'd expect you to consider this board - at the same time, you might find that the board comes unstuck.

There might not be a problem if you've got two GeForce 7800 GTX 256s or GeForce 7800 GTs, as both use single slot cooling solutions. Air flow maybe hindered slightly, but it's physically possible to run two single slot video cards and three PCI cards at the same time. Those looking to watercool two video cards in SLI, or even run two GeForce 7800 GTX 512s will be severely limited in their add-in card options.

With ASUS opting to implement an on-board ALC850-based sound solution, it falls behind the likes of MSI, who have implemented a Creative SoundBlaster Live! on the K8N Diamond and the Audigy chip on their nForce4 SLI x16 implementation. Both of those come with high definition audio support, and are significantly better than the AC97 codec in some instances. In order to upgrade to something like Creative's X-Fi add-in card, you're going to require a PCI slot. This highlights the I/O port layout limitation again - if you're water-cooling two video cards in SLI, there's little or no room for an X-Fi without an immense amount of fiddling around.

That brings us on to another topic - the CMOS reset jumper is an absolute pain in the backside to remove - it's right under the retention hook on the bottom PCI-Express x16 slot and I needed a pair of needle headed pliers to reset CMOS using the jumper after removing the bottom video card. Eventually, I gave up as it was far too fiddly - just imagine having to dismantle your water-cooling setup just to get at the damn CMOS jumper.

I decided that removing the battery and pulling the power lead was the easiest way to reset CMOS. It would be great to see a tool free CMOS reset in a future revision of this motherboard. This is a bit of an oversight in the design stage, in my opinion. Enthusiasts and overclockers are likely to fiddle a little too much on the odd occasion, so a well-placed CMOS reset jumper is something that we've come to expect on a high-end motherboard targeted at enthusiasts.

Despite these layout flaws, the board looks absolutely fantastic - if you've got no plans to install add-in cards you'll overlook most of the flaws. The heatpipe is a prominent feature of the board but it could interfere with some larger heatsink designs. Having said that, you will not have any problems if your heatsink adheres to AMD's guidelines. The same goes for water-blocks, too. Make sure that you install the additional fan on the heatpipe radiator that covers the PWMs in between the CPU socket and rear I/O panel, as things can get pretty toasty with no airflow.

The board was as stable as anything else we've ever seen - it ran our stress test - consisting of simultaneous instances of Prime95, IOMeter and 3DMark03 - in SLI mode for 27 hours before we decided to halt the stress test manually. This is highly commendable - ASUS has a reputation of building fantastically solid motherboards and this one is no exception to that reputation.

Overclocking with this board has also improved a little, too. We managed to get the board stable at 279MHz with the memory running in sync using a 10.0x CPU multiplier to give just under 2800MHz - the stock speed for our Athlon 64 FX-57. We also found that it'd run all day long at 308MHz HTT with a 9.0x CPU multiplier using the 166MHz memory divider. We're sure the board would manage this with the memory in sync too, but our FX-57 appears to have a pretty poor memory controller in comparison to what is considered the norm amongst the overclocking community.

Value:

There are many places in the UK that are listing the ASUS A8N32-SLI, but none of them have stock at the moment. There could be a good reason behind this. Many of you will remember the explosions at the fuel depot in Hemel Hemstead on the 11th December. The ASUS UK offices are located about 200 metres from the fuel depot - not surprisingly, they're inaccessible at the moment. We're not sure whether or not ASUS uses its UK office as a distribution hub for UK distributors, but we suspect that the fire might delay the arrival of stock at UK online retailers until next year.

Prices are likely to change when stock arrives, but Misco are the cheapest at the moment at just over £140. Other places worth keeping an eye on are CPU City, MicroDirect, Overclockers UK and Scan. Scan are the most expensive at the moment though, listing the board at £156! In contrast, competing boards like the DFI LANParty nF4 SLI-DR are available for as little as £136 on Ebuyer, while the ASUS A8N-SLI Premium is available for £117. Sapphire's rather good PI-A9RX480 is available for £125 on Ebuyer and DFI's RDX200 CF-DR is available for an inflated £152.

Final Thoughts...

The ASUS A8N32-SLI is a fantastically stable motherboard, much like any other ASUS motherboard we've had the pleasure of using. In general, it was no slower than the DFI LANParty nF4 SLI-DR, and it was faster than it in some instances - like Doom 3. While NVIDIA's nForce4 SLI x16 chipset doesn't bring performance on leaps and bounds, we feel it is one for the future with plenty of performance left to unlock. Right now, two PCI-Express x16 slots are generally not needed and provide little or no performance improvement over the standard nForce4 SLI chipset. They may be required in the future, though.

However, there are some questionable design decisions made on the layout that might dissuade many power users from buying this motherboard. The lack of a decent high definition audio codec is another downfall, especially when competing solutions have these high-end features included as standard. Aside from these quibbles, the board is a damn good looker and a damn good performer too.

Excessive? Yes. Will enthusiasts buy the A8N32-SLI because it's excessive? Probably, yes.