Pure, concentrated whoopass, now in motherboard form.
Written: Jan 13 '03 (Updated Feb 12 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Downright awesome in pretty much every category
Cons: Some features are ahead of their time
The Bottom Line: Excellent board, excellent chipset. Some features may be overkill for the majority of users.
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| Action_Snark's Full Review: ASUS A7N8X Motherboard |
Well, the day finally came. The day when I decided that Verloc, my beloved Athlon based gaming box was getting a little long in the tooth. Morrowind stuttered, UT2K3 wheezed, and I fumed. I set out on a long trek through the muddy streets of internet vendors, searching out the best hardware I could afford, so that I might have the technology to rebuild my gaming box. Better. Faster. Stronger.
I'd heard mindnumbing amounts of buzz from the Internet Rumor Mill (TM) about the great things that the nForce2 was going to be capable of. The orgional nForce chipset was a fairly solid, stable platform, but was aimed more at the bargain end of the market. I made up my mind on the chipset issue, and moved on, to decide on this board, the Asus A7N8X. Anyway, enough patter, read on for the Patented Action Snark Rundown of the Asus A7N8X Deluxe nForce2 based motherboard.
The Layout The A7N8X is fairly densely packed with various stuff. The overall layout is decent, though it's obvious that compromises were made in the placement of certain things on the board. Everything is pretty vanilla, with the IDE and FDD connectors actually placed in a semi-intelligent manner, and cut down on a lot of gymnastics to get my devices wired up.
My biggest gripes about the layout of the board are with the placement of the ATX power connector, the headers for the USB and Firewire ports, and some capacitors sprouting around the CPU slot. The ATX connector is right next to the FDD connector, which makes it a pain to get the FDD cable plugged in. Next up, the Firewire and USB headers. They're jammed down by the PCI slots, and can be a pain to get to. Finally, the final gripe: Those pesky capacitors around the CPU slot. They're within spec for impedences around the slot, but they will make life rather...interesting... for anyone trying to put on an x-box sized heatsink. I'm considering getting a Swiftech MCX 462 or an Alpha PAL8045, and I plan on stocking up on Maalox before I do the installation.
SPECS, MOTHER*****R, DO YOU SPEAK THEM!?!
Ok, now to the real meat and potatos of this chunk of review: The hardware specs itself. I purchased the 'Deluxe' or as I like to call it, the 'Pimp Snookie' version of the motherboard, which comes with some added bells and whistles.
The Basics
FSB: Supports up to 333mhz (400mhz support is rumored, but Asus hasn't said one way or the other.)
Chipset: Nvidia nForce2 MCP-T and nForce2 SPP
Memory: 3 184 pin DDR DIMM slots, up to 3gb memory supported
(PC1600 to PC3200 supported)
IDE: 2x ATA-133, supports up to 4 devices
FDD: 1x FDD
AGP: 1x 8x AGP port
PCI: 5x PCI slot
USB: 6x USB 2.0 port
Sounds fairly solid so far. Looks like we got some good technology, and this board's shaping up to be a decent platform. Of course, we haven't yet gotten to
The Cool Stuff
Onboard Sound: 6-channel RealTek ALC650, w/ integrated amplifier and Audio Processing Unit, along with the Soundstorm encoder.
Onboard LAN: Dual onboard NICs, 1x 3com controller, living on the MCP, and an nVidia LAN controller on the board.
SATA RAID: Onboard Sil 3112 SATA RAID controller, supports RAID 0/1
Onboard Firewire: 2 onboard ports, controller on the MCP-T.
So, overall, the A7N8X Deluxe is a very cool piece of technology. The nForce2 chipset is a real piece of work, and provides some very tasty onboard components. The onboard sound is quite good, not suffering from any scratchiness or distortion, and generating only barely discernable empty channel static.
The onboard NICs are also quite satisfactory, though dual NICs are overkill for users who aren't setting up a firewall. However, the onboard NICs aren't perfect. The onboard nVidia controller tends to place a little more load on the system's resources. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but so far I can only get the nVidia NIC working under Linux. It's a minor issue, but an annoyance nonetheless.
Overall, I'd give the A7N8X Deluxe high marks. Both ASUS and nVidia have delivered with this board. The issues with the technology are minor, and the board is capable of so very much. Sure, some of the features (SATA RAID and dual NICs) are going to be of limited use for the moment (SATA RAID) or for most users (dual NICs), but still, this board was most impressive.
Performance: With all the bells and whistles the A7N8X is sporting, one would think it's something akin to a Lincoln Navigator. Loaded with luxuries, but a pig when it comes to speed. However, the A7N8X seems to be more like something wearing a badge that says 'Porsche' than any Sport/Luxury monstrosity out there today.
The BIOS menu has some very overclocking friendly features. FSB is adjustible in 1mhz increments from 100 to 200 mhz, and 3mhz increments going even higher. One of the big things this board has going for it is that it has the same ability that the KT400 chipsets have: It's capable of changing multiplier settings on an unmodified Thoroughbred core Athlon XP processor. Multiplier settings as high as 17x are avalible. AGP slot and CPU core voltage are also adjustable. Unfortunately, my CPU cooling is lacking, so I've yet to take a foray into super happy fun #1 lucky overclock land. Therefore, I cannot comment on the A7N8X's performance when overclocked, but the possibilities it presents are enough to leave most O/C fanatics drooling down their chins.
The A7N8X also features a 'dual channel' DDR architecture. In laymen's terms, this means that with two identical sticks of RAM stuffed into the right slots, the board can double it's transfer rate to/from physical memory, up to a very muscular 6.4 gb/second, up from the normal 3.2 gb/sec that DDR400 usually provides. Unfortunately, I could only afford a single 512mb stick of PC2700, so I can't comment on the board's rather impressive memory capabilities, beyond informing you of their existance.
Overall: Overall, I'm very happy with this board. The difference between this board, and the old AMD761 based board that preceded it is like night and day. The sheer glut of onboard accessories, plus the board's impressive performance (It's got the VIA KT400 chipsets beat hands down) are persuasive reasons to go with this board. Coupled with it's stability (No more playing 'soundblaster roulette' like I had to do with my old board), and you've got a lot of reasons to go with this board. The only caveat I'd give is that the 'Deluxe' version may be overkill for most users, and they can save 40 clams or so by going with a non deluxe version, which lacks a lot of bells and whistles that most users would have little to no use for.
Long story short: This board is sex. 195 proof, almost absolutely pure sex. Dipped in chocolate. With a light dusting of additional sex and chocolate on top. Excellent features, excellent performance, and probably the best AthlonXP solution on the market at the present time.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 154.00
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Action_Snark
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