Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe: Board Layout
Recent top-line motherboards form Asus have been part of the Ai Life series, and the A8N32-SLI Deluxe continues that tradition.
Like the Intel version of the 32-SLI,
gaming is emphasized in all of the packaging and manuals. That makes perfect sense in this AMD version of the Dual x16 design.
Layout of the A8N32-SLI Deluxe is close to, if not exactly, the layout of the Intel version reviewed last week. This should come as no surprise, since both versions are based on similar NVIDIA chipsets. The board is dominated by interacting heatpipes in a totally fanless and silent design.
The CPU socket area is dominated by MOSFET heatsinks along two sides of the CPU. These heatsinks are cooled by the CPU fan in an air-cooled system, but this board's design invites water cooling.
With a water cooling block on the CPU, there is often no fan, so Asus provides fans that can be attached to the heatsinks for cooling with a water block - or if you just want better cooing in a heavily overclocked system.
The layout is typically Asus, which means that it is generally very well done. We were particularly pleased to see the floppy and hard drive connectors on the upper-right edge of the board where they belong. The IDE connector that falls a bit south of mid-line is an edge connector, which should not interfere with other components in the area.
Power connections are split, but both the 24-pin and 12v are on board edges, so bulky power cables don't need to be snaked over the CPU.
This AMD version uses a 4-pin 12v connector compared to the 8-pin used on the Intel version. This should be your first clue that the current AMD design is not quite as demanding of power as the Intel version.
Another example of lower power demands of the AMD design is the EZplug connector to provide more power to the video cards. On the Intel design, the board will not operate properly without connecting EZPlug. On the AMD version, the manual says that the EZPlug is only needed if you are using 2 cards "without their own auxiliary power connectors". Otherwise, EZPlug is not needed for stability.
Click to enlarge.
Sata is all Sata 2 - 4 ports from the South bridge plus 2 Sata2 from the Silicon Image 3132. Everything on the board is similarly state of the art except for audio.
ATI recently raised the bar for AMD on-board sound by including hooks for High-Definition audio in their Rx480 chipset for AMD. With that in mind, AC '97 audio is now inadequate for most users - even if it supports 8 channels. There is the less-than-stellar sound quality of AC '97, combined with the higher-than-average CPU usage that robs performance from games. Unless your needs are pretty basic, we would suggest disabling the on-board audio and installing a real sound card. It is ironic that NVIDIA pioneered decent on-board sound with their nForce2 chipset, and they now have the worst audio solution available for AMD. We hope that NVIDIA will change that in the near future.
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Wesley Fink - Friday, November 4, 2005 - link
We did not test with an XP90 or XP120. What I can tell you is the fan on our Thermaltake heatsink (in the picture of the optional HS fan in the review) is an 80mm. I just measured and there is still an additional 1/2" clearnance to theheatsink and heatpipes on the IO and bottom sides and an additional 1" to the heatsink at the top of the socket. My guess based on these measurements is that an XP90 should be fine, but I'm not sure about an XP120.Rike - Friday, November 4, 2005 - link
Regarding the HS, is it just me or is there a lot of dust in the fins?Peldor - Friday, November 4, 2005 - link
I don't think you should be ripping on "other" sites for claiming x16 lane SLI has big benefits over x8, when http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2580&am...">Anandtech showed the same thing on a P4 board. You certainly didn't make it clear in that article that the 81.85 drivers were the primary reason for the higher scores.wbloon - Sunday, December 18, 2005 - link
Yes they did, you must have only skimmed the article. Go back and do your homework before showing your lassitude, dude.Gary Key - Friday, November 4, 2005 - link
I think the Intel article was very clear about indicating several factors played into the results we witnessed-This topic has been discussed greatly in the comments section of the Intel article. I also stated in the game section the base improvement of the Asus board over the MSI board was 3% on average. I attribute this to bios optimizations, board design, and possibly improvements in the A3 stepping of the C19 Northbridge. The difference we found between the boards utilizing a very GPU intensive game (F.E.A.R.) ran from 6% to almost 11% indicating in this particular game an advantage/optimizations of the x16SLI over the X8SLI. The difference in going from 11% to 25% when implementing AA/AF is probably 90%+ due to the 81.85 driver set in my opinion. After statements from several readers I further clarified my statement on this increase in the article. However, I firmly believe with the right GPU setup and application there is a true improvement due to the additional bandwidth with the x16SLI.
You cannot directly compare the Intel and AMD board due to the differences in the Northbridge chipset (C19 vs CK51) and the fact the memory controller is integrated in the Intel Northbridge instead of on the CPU in AMD's case. Wesley noticed differences in the single card benchmarks of up to 17% where mine were within the reported differences between the board designs (we will also test with a single core P4EE which should reduce the cpu bottleneck on the Intel board at higher resolutions). I have additional x8sli boards at this time and a revised bios for the MSI P4N that will be tested for a mini-update on this subject. We should see additional x16SLI boards in December for head to head tests utilizing the same chipset.
Also, not all games or applications showed this type of increase as stated. We had some issues with the BF2 SLI benchmarks but should have those worked out shortly but I imagine this will be one game that also benefits directly from the x16SLI setup.
Thank you. :)
Wesley Fink - Friday, November 4, 2005 - link
There is a BIG difference between 0% to 8% SLI performance improvement and the 40% to 50% claimed in one review we saw. We thought it would be unprofessional to "name names", but with all the hype that 40% to 50% claim generated in many Forums we needed to address the facts head on.Our video review team plans an article looking at the performance increases in both the new nVidia and ATI drivers in an upcoming article. We have seen results on the newest games on this Asus with 81.85 as much as 40% higher than other nF4 boards tested with 78.01. However, most of that was drivers since we could only find increases of 0% to 8% in SLI and 0% to 17% in single 7800GTX. These are significant, but they aren't a 50% increase.
Hanners - Friday, November 4, 2005 - link
Except, unlike the site I believe you are thinking of, you haven't done any testing (that I can see) using SLI AA, which is the one feature of NVIDIA's SLI feature set that will benefit greatly from the availability of two 'true' 16x PCI Express slots, as it transfers data via the PCI Express bus rather than using the inter-GPU connector as per other SLI modes.Wesley Fink - Friday, November 4, 2005 - link
You are correct that we did not select 8X or 16X AA in the nVidia driver, which I believe is the feature you are talking about. We selected anti-aliasing in the game, as we have in the past with our testing. We are looking into the possible impact of the "in-driver" AA on test results.Wesley Fink - Friday, November 4, 2005 - link
ALL of our game tests are 4XAA and 8XAF where that can be set - both SLI and single video. All game tests were run at 1600x1200. Please read the title bars and the Test Setup. This is clearly spelled out in the review.Leper Messiah - Friday, November 4, 2005 - link
oooh. I have my NF4 mobo. This thing is bought as soon as I see one in stock...