The Asus A8N SLI Premium is the newest addition to the firm’s sizable nForce 4 based line-up, and is the current flagship AMD board. It comes in a rather small and unassuming black box, into which are neatly packed a number of goodies. Before we look at those on the next page, let’s take a look at the motherboard itself.
The board’s layout is, for the most part, excellent. There is ample room around the CPU socket for even the largest of over-sized coolers, and the PSU connectors are positioned so that you avoid hanging over the main cooler with bulky cables. The IDE and floppy connectors are to the right of the board making it easy to fold the flat IDE cables behind the motherboard tray. There are a total of 8 SATA ports, four of which are handled by the chipset’s native SATA-II controller, and four of which use the Silicon Image 3114 controller. Northbridge cooling is handled by an innovative heat-pipe based passive design that channels the Northbridge’s heat into a large heat sink situated at the top of the board. This heat sink also keeps the MOSFETs cool which will be important to overclockers. There are also a very generous five 3 pin fan headers on the board, meaning you wont have to resort to using 3-4 pin adaptors even in large cases.
Asus has been especially generous with the space between the two PCI-E 16x graphics slots. Whilst this is far less of an issue with the single-slot 7800GTX cards, for dual-slot cards like the 6800 Ultra, the extra breathing room is very welcome. You will also notice that the Asus has no need for a selector card, and can have SLI mode enabled or disabled simply by changing a setting in the BIOS. When you have two cards installed, a 4 pin Molex needs to be plugged into a slot just above the top slot.
On the back plate you will find a total of four USB 2.0 slots, a full-size Firewire port, both optical and digital coaxial SPDIF outputs, twin gigabit LAN ports as well as the usual audio, PS2 and parallel ports.
The layout of the Asus is not all Perfect. The top video card slot is too close to the memory clips meaning you will have to remove the card to upgrade your RAM. Whilst the passive heat pipe sink is an impressive feature, it falls short in upside-down cases such as the Lian Li PC-V1000, since the fluid in the heat pipe will rise into the Northbridge rather than to the heat sinks for dissipation. The PCI-E retention clips are also difficult to use when using double-slot coolers, as you need fingers no larger than those of a child’s to reach behind the card to unclip it.
