It wasn’t so long ago that we took a look at the superb Asus A8N SLI Premium edition board, and found it to be both a very capable performer and also packed with as many features as you are ever likely to need. Never one to rest on their laurels however, Asus has updated the specification of their flagship model to the A8N32 SLI Deluxe, which sports an even better specification thanks to the inclusion of two 16x PCI express lanes rather than a single 16x that split into 8x when using the board in SLI. Asus has updated its box design to something blacker, sleeker and altogether more eye-catching than the previous design, and the bundle has been improved as well. You can Purchase the A8N32-SLI Deluxe at www.chillblast.com who have the board in stock right now.
The Board
The motherboard itself is a truly fantastic piece of engineering, taking the best aspects of the SLI premium and building on them even further. First of all, unlike the previous generation, Asus has now included amazing 8-phase power circuitry, with 8 banks of coils and 8 banks of MOSFETs along the edge of the CPU socket. This 8-phase design will greatly reduce the requirement for input ripple, which helps to keep the CPU stable and improves overclocking. It also improves the efficiency of the motherboard, helping to reduce power requirements of both the board itself and the CPU installed in it.
With the A8N32-SLI Asus has used not one but two chipsets. It uses a C51 Northbridge chip (without integrated graphics) to drive the top PEG slot, and an NForce 4 SLI chip for the southbridge. This enables a total of 40 PCIe lanes in total, as well as dual 16x slots. As with the Premium, Asus has made the A8N32-SLI a totally fanless design. If you have a need for an ultra-quiet system, this is the perfect motherboard for you. In an air-cooled system, the MOSFET heat sink receives all of the cooling it needs from the CPU fan. In a water cooled setup, or indeed if you just want the best possible cooling for overclocking, Asus also provides a radial fan that clips onto the copper cooler. This fan runs at 3000rpm and operates substantially quieter than most Northbridge coolers, as is common with radial models.
The layout of the IDE and floppy cables has been slightly tweaked, moving them all to the outside edge and the primary IDE port angled at 90 degrees rather like we have seen on Abit boards. These small cosmetic improvements have little impact but were presumably made to give the designers more space. One area of improvement is that there is no longer interference from the RAM slots from the video card as Asus have moved everything down by one slot. This does cost us a PCI-E add-on card slot and also places two PCI slots inconveniently between the video cards, but you can’t have everything I suppose. Another layout issue is the placement of the clear CMOS jumper, which was situated underneath the PCI-E retention clip. With an SLI video card installed, this would make clearing the CMOS a major hassle, likely requiring removal of the video card. Users might find it easier just to pop out the battery if they tweak too far.
There are a total of six SATA-2 ports, four from the Southbridge and two from a Silicon Image 3132 controller. One of these has been bizarrely mounted on the I/O plate which may be useful for users of high-speed SATA-connector external hard drives but is a perplexing choice for everyone else. The I/O arrangement is otherwise excellent, offering Parallel, both types of digital audio, analogue audio and dual gigabit LAN.
Bundle
The bundle of cables is good, with plenty of SATA cables and SATA power adaptors should you need them. PCI expansion plates for USB Firewire and serial are also included. You get trial antivirus software on the A8N32's driver disk, as well as WinDVD Suite from Intervideo.
Now we are familiar with the board and its bundle, lets take a look at performance.
