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Asus A8N SLI Premium nVidia nForce4 Socket 939 motherboard

Saturday, November 19th, 2005 | Motherboard Reviews, Reviews

The range of high quality boards for AMD Athlon chips, namely socket 939 is fairly big. With a range of boards to choose from big manufacturers like MSI and DFI there is a good chance to get all you need from a board with a little investigation.

If you have or are planning on a system utilising socket 939, you can’t go wrong with this fully-featured board.

Main features include…

• Socket 939 for AMD 64
• SLI Graphics capabilities
• Passive cooling, using no fans is quiet
• SATA2 with NCQ
• Windows based overclocking

The A8N sports socket 939, which is for Athlon 64, Athlon 64 FX, Athlon x2 and Sempron processors.

The nVidia nForce4 SLI chipset is cooled by a passive cooler which has a heat pipe running to a set of coolers by the back of the motherboard, just behind the network ports and that stuff.

There are 2 SATA controllers, one of which supports up to 4 drives, configurable in RAID 0, 1, 5 or 10. The bonus with these options is that RAID 5 results in the loss of only 1 drive worth of space for redundancy, so 4 drives will yield the space of 3.

DDR memory is still the name of the game for Athlon chips. Intels have moved on to using DDR2, which should happen in the future for AMDs as well, but for now, DDR will have to do.

Other extra features include 2 network ports, both of which are gigabit ethernet controllers, 4 rear USB 2.0 ports, as well as some from the board, high quality built-in audio and the traditional helping of IDE slots.

One thing missing is a firewire port. Although not as common as USB, for this price, it would have been a good rounding off of the package.

The overclocking ability of this motherboard is great. For those who don’t know much about overclocking and just want the easiest route, there is oveclocking software included, which allows you to boost system bus speed up to 110%. Not huge, but cool anyway, and within safe limits.

So as an overall package, you can’t get too much more than this. For those who support AMD and want SLI graphics with good overclocking options, then this board will give you all you could need. I would certainly consider this board for a new AMD based system for myself. Combine it with my personal choice of the Athlon 64 3000+, overclock a little and I’d be happy.

Pros

• SATA options galore
• decent audio
• Gigabit LAN
• SLI

Cons

• No firewire

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