The Bottom Line
ASUS has made a top notch AMD Athlon motherboard with the NVIDIA nForce2 chipset. This is one of the best performing and well built motherboards available today with the latest technology for PCs.
Pros
- Excellent Features
- High Performance Numbers
- Wide Range of Overclocking Settings
Cons
- Lacks CAS 1T Latency Setting
- Q-Fan Only Documented in BIOS
Description
- NVIDIA nForce2 Chipset
- Supports All Current AMD Athlon Socket A Processors
- Dual-Channel PC3200 DDR Memory Support Up to 3GB
- MCP2-T "SoundStream" 6-channel Audio with Dolby Digital 5.1 Support
- Silicon Image 3112A Serial ATA RAID Controller
- UltraDMA 133/100 Support
- NVIDIA 10/100 FastEthernet and 3Com Gigabit Ethernet
- AGP 8x (3.0) Slot and 5 PCI 2.2 Slots
- 6 USB 2.0 and 2 IEEE 1394 (Firewire) Connectors
- ASUS POST Reporter, Q-FAN Technology and C.O.P. (CPU Overheatin Protection)
Guide Review - ASUS A7N8X Deluxe
If you are looking for an AMD Athlon motherboard, it is hard not to pick the A7N8X Deluxe. This motherboard packs a large amount of extras onto the motherboard that would end up costing a whole lot more if they were purchased separately for a basic motherboard. The quality of the construction and performance levels of the board are hard to beat. Stability when running a processor at its standard clocks with the Aggressive CPU and memory settings provided no crashes at all over extended periods of usage. The only thing missing from this board is the NVIDIA IGP, but the limited 3D performance of the IGP chip is no big loss to those looking for high-speed 3D graphics. Overall, this is the best Athlon motherboard currently on the market.
