nForce4 SLI Motherboards: Premium Performance at a Bargain Price

ASUS A8N-SLI Premium: Features

Asus designed an organized and generally well laid out board with all major connections easily reachable. The board is lacking most clearance issues and was easy to install in a mid-size ATX case. Asus did an excellent job with the color coordination of the various peripheral slots and connectors.

Asus has engineered a very effective cooling system that utilizes a small heat sink attached to a heat pipe that comes in direct contact with the nForce4-SLI chipset. This system then transfers the heat to a finned heat sink that also cools the MOSFETs. The whole system is fanless, but relies on the exhaust air generated by the CPU heat sink fan to cool the finned heat sink. We would recommend that a fan be placed on or near this heat sink when water or phase change cooling systems are utilized.

The DIMM module slots' color coordination is correct for dual channel setup. The memory modules are difficult with a full size video card installed in the first PCI Express x16 slot. The power plug placement favors a standard ATX case design and the power cable management is very good. The floppy drive port connector and the two nForce4 IDE port connectors are conveniently located on the front edge of the board along with the 24 pin ATX power connector.

The nForce4 SATA II (black) ports are conveniently located down and to the left of the CK8-04 chipset. The SATA II ports feature the new clamp and latch design. Asus did not include the new cable designs in their accessory kit, which greatly enhance the security of the SATA connections.

The Silicon Image 3114R SATA II RAID (red) ports are located to the left of the CK8-04 chipset and above the nForce4 SATA II ports. The SATA II ports feature the old attachment design that could create connection issues.

The nForce4 USB connectors, IEEE1394a connector, Com1 serial port, and System Panel connector are located along the left edge of the board. The CMOS reset is a traditional jumper design located between the battery and Super I/O chipset that proved to be inconvenient at times.

The board comes with (2) physical PCI Express x16 slots, (3) 32bit PCI slots, (1) PCI Express x1 slot, and (1) PCI Express x4 slot. The layout of this design offers a very good balance of slots and allows for numerous add-in peripheral cards.

However, in between the two x16 PCI Express slots are the two PCI-E slots. This configuration could potentially render the PCI-E x1 slot useless when utilizing the first x16 PCI Express slot. The amount of space in-between the two PCI-E x16 slots is excellent and allows for a two-slot or third party video card cooling solution to be utilized. The first PCI slot next to the second PCI-E x16 slot will be rendered useless when utilizing a two-slot video card cooling solution.

Returning to the CPU socket area, we find ample room for alternative cooling solutions. We utilized the stock AMD heat sink, but also verified that several aftermarket cooling systems would fit in this area during our tests.

The finned heat sink, which cools the MOSFETs and is part of the heat pipe system, is visible along with the 4-pin 12V molex connector next to the PCI-E x16 slot. The molex connector is required when utilizing two video cards in SLI operation.

Asus places the four-pin 12V auxiliary power connector at the top of the CPU socket area, but out of the way of most aftermarket cooling solutions.

The rear panel contains the standard PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, parallel port, two LAN ports, and 4 USB ports. Located below the parallel port and to the right of the PS/2 ports are the Coaxial S/PDIF, Optical S/PDIF, and IEEE-1394a connectors. The audio panel consists of 6 ports that can be configured for 2, 4, 6, and 8-channel audio connections.