Possibly the best consumer MB ever built for AMD chips
Written: Aug 05 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Excellent features, overwhelming connectivity, price, speed
Cons: questionable onboard sound performance. spotty driver installation
The Bottom Line: The Deluxe version of this card is hands-down excellent. The sound issues are disconcerting, but overlookable. Run out and buy one today.
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| benpatient's Full Review: ASUS A7N8X Motherboard |
I recently built a couple of computers, one for myself, and another for a friend.
Spending a lot of money wasn't high on my list, so I avoided Intel after a little pricewatch.com searching.
AMD's Barton XP processors seemed to be getting great reviews across the board, so I opted for the (then) $90 XP 2500+. (As it turns out, I can easily overclock this chip to XP 3000+ levels, with stock cooling and no physical mods. 3000+ chips are $270 right now.)
The A7N8X-Deluxe appeared to be, from everything I've read, too good to be true. SATA, dual LAN, 5.1 sound w/Dolby Digital, 6 USB 2.0 ports, 2 firewire ports, 8x AGP, AGP speedlock, 400mhz FSB and dual-channel 400mhz DDR, basically the works. And no jumpers to bother with (unless you want to run a slow (100 or 166mhz) FSB...and I can't imagine why you'd want to do that...
Why anyone would buy the basic A7N8X for 10 dollars less is beyond my comprehension.
Well, the cards came in, overloaded with cables and adapters and books and discs and diagrams and all. Nice, comprehensive set of accessories, all things considered. Installation was straightforward, if you're the PC-building type. You have to replace the standard back I/O panel, because the A7N8X has so many ports on the back, but a replacement one is provided, and it sets easily into place.
The A7N8X has a green LED light that is on whenever there is power supplied to the mobo, whether the computer is on or not. I thought this was a nice touch.
I plugged everything in and started the system up. The BIOS program is well-thought-out and feature-laden. You can adjust almost anything you could imagine. The only thing I could not change from the BIOS was graphics card memory and core speeds, something that's beyond the scope of the mobo's influence, anyway.
You can disable basically everything from BIOS, including (thankfully) the voice-based POST infomation/error messages.
For what it's worth, you can also change the voice recordings to some of your own liking—a feature that seems like overkill—through a Windows-based utility.
The POST goes through it's motions, Plug N Play organizes everything, the SATA driver checks for SATA drives (I have one, more on that in a bit), and then Windows starts up (presuming you have a copy installed on a boot device.)
The provided driver disc introduced me to my first hiccup with the A7N8X-Deluxe. All the necessary drivers are there, but installing them can be very confusing, because there isn't a simple "turn everything on" option. You can do the "all-in-one" driver installation, but it seems like it skips a couple of things. I did this for one of the two computers I built, and loaded them on my own with the other. My specific concern is with the USB 2.0 drivers, which with the manual install you must first install one item, then another, and you cannot do them out of order. The problem is that one of the items they say to install isn't actually where they say it is. It's in another directory in a separate part of the disc, and when they say things like "follow these instructions exactly" in a readme.txt file, and you simply cannot follow them "exactly" because the files and folders mentioned don't exist, it's a bit disconcerting. Especially when it says "failure to do these steps in the correct order may necessitate a clean re-install of windows in the future."
Not what I care to hear for something as mundane as a USB adapter.
That little hitch aside, I got everything going, and I must say that I like the ASUS utilities that are provided. I can easily find out how fast my fans are spinning, how hot various components are, and all the exact mobo voltages. You can also record this info if you so desire. Useful to run during long-running benchmark tests, if you're into that.
The sound utility for the onboard sound is pretty useful, as well. You can adjust the output of all 6 channels, set up simulated channels when you don't have one, or when your programs don't provide info for all of your speakers on their own, and you can turn on or off the digital and analog outputs. There's an EQ and various other functional utilities.
One problem I had with this utility was that I couldn't get it to keep certain settings turned on when I played directX games that use 3d sound. I would set the utility to 4.1 surround, and then play one of these games, and when i returned to the utility, it was reset to 2 speakers again. Very frustrating...
The quality of the sound itself is a little bit spotty in places. I am a SoundBlaster Live! veteran, and I expect a pretty high quality sound experience, and I keep getting these weird glitches in sound that I think are related directly to either the nForce sound hardware, or the drivers themselves. I will attempt to do a driver upgrade soon and see if this fixes the problem. Basically, a lot of the 3d sound effects in games like GTA don't come out right, even in stereo mode. The ambient sounds that should be quieter are much louder. If i install my old SB Live! card, and run sound through that, the problem goes away.
As promised, a word on SATA: As anyone using a serial ATA hard drive may already know, Windows XP installation doesn't recognize SATA drives without a driver floppy disk. Now, on the A7N8X driver disc, there are a couple of folders in the SATA driver folder labeled "Disk 1" and "Disk 2." It's apparently presumed that they are the necessary files for floppy start-up driver disks. Unfortunately, there aren't any pre-made floppy disks included with the A7N8X. You can make your own floppy disks, of course, but only if you have access to another computer, or you already have windows installed on a parallel ATA drive hooked up to your computer. In other words, if you are in a locked room with all new components, and only have SATA hard drives, a full system of hardware, the provided installation discs, and a copy of WinXP Pro, you can't do a thing. You can't install WinXP to a SATA drive without a floppy disk, because it won't search for startup drivers from a CD drive. Luckily, I have access to other computers.
When there is so much included in this box (there are even 2 SATA interface cables included!), it seems like a shame to forget something as simple as this.
Anyway, once you get going with the SATA, you can do RAID 0 or 1 arrays to your heart's content (provided you only want to use 2 drives, or you add a PCI SATA controller card to handle more connections).
Now, I've focused on a couple of the problems I had with this mobo, but the truth is, it does so many things so well, I'd have a hard time not recommending it.
I am a bit of an overclocker, and the A7N8X is a heaven-sent marvel of a machine for these purposes.
As I mentioned above, I was able to easily overclock my processor (though a combination of processor clock multiplier and FSB speed tweaks) to over 2.1 GHz, which is equivalent to about an XP 3000+. Benchmark scores verify this. Please note, I didn't have to touch the processor voltage (or any voltage at all in fact) to achieve these numbers. I'm still running relatively cool processor and mobo temps, considering that I'm using stock cooling measures and I have 6 drives crammed into a mid-tower case...
I was also able to run my CAS 2.5 DDR RAM at CAS 2.0 simply by dropping the FSB from 200 to 193 through the BIOS controls. Another bump in speed.
The AGP speed is locked to 66mhz regardless of what FSB I run, which is great, because that allows me to overclock my 9600 Pro to 475/320 without any loss of stability.
Simply put, by recycling my old monitor, keyboard, and mouse, I was able to build a 600 dollar computer that can easily break 11500 in 3d Mark 2001 at 1024/32bit.
That translates into a system that can handle not only today's toughest games with ease, but also everything we're going to see for the next 6 months or more.
The features of the A7N8X-Deluxe made this possible.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 129
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Epinions.com ID:
benpatient
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Member: Ben Frey
Location: Nashville, TN, USA
Reviews written: 17
Trusted by: 0 members
About Me:
Honest reviews. Honest.
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