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by ASUS
Specifications
The A7N8X Deluxe motherboard from ASUS comes supplied with everything one can need integrated onto the motherboard except for video. While NVIDIA offers an integrated graphics processor chipset, ASUS has decided to forego this unit to allow users to select a more powerful AGP expansion card on their own. All of the latest technologies have been built into this board including Serial ATA, Gigabit Ethernet, AGP 8x (3.0), USB 2.0, IEEE1394 (Firewire) and NVIDIA's superb 6-channel APU. Memory The nForce2 chipset was the first to allow support for a 400 MHz frontside memory bus for AMD based processors. This allows for PC3200 DDR memory to be used with the motherboard. Of course, a synchronous bus speed allows for the best overall performance of the memory bus with the CPU, thus PC2700 memory is most likely going to be used with the latest Barton core Athlon XP processors unless you are looking to overclock the processor. This does allow for future support of 400 MHz frontside bus Athlon processors from AMD. The other unique feature to the nForce2 is the use of dual-channel memory controllers. This allows the motherboard to have a maximum memory bandwidth of 5.4 GB/s or 6.4 GB/s with two modules of PC2700 or PC3200 respectively. Most users who use two DIMM modules on the motherboard will not generally notice the increased memory performance. The additional bandwidth typically is only used by memory intensive applications, something most everyday applications won't necessarily use. People looking at video or graphics editing, database applications or heavy Office application use will benefit from this design. If there is one area of disappointment with the memory support on this board it is with the lack of a 1T CAS Latency setting in the BIOS. There are a number of high quality memory modules on the market currently that support this setting, so why was it left out of the BIOS? Audio One of the great features of this motherboard is the audio proccessor unit supplied with it. The NVIDIA MCP-T has what they call "SoundStream" technology. This audio processor is capable of supporting a 6-speaker configuration, Dolby Digital 5.1 support, hardware acceleration of 256 2D voices and 64 3D voices and includes SPDIF interfaces. This is a very robust onboard solution that is compared favorably against Creative's Sound Blaster Audigy and Audigy 2 and it's included on the motherboard! ASUS did tweak the APU slightly so the default nForce2 drivers from NVIDIA will not necessarily work. Driver updates should be obtained from ASUS to ensure compatibility. Some users of this board have complained about unwanted noise being produced on the audio channels. During my testing of the board I was unable to detect any static noise either during audio playback or idle noise levels. Accessories The A7N8X Deluxe comes with a wide range of brackets and cables to help get everything configured in your computer. Included with the board are:
The inclusion of the Serial ATA cables is especially welcome now that SATA hard drives are finally starting to arrive on the market. Performance Performance testing for the A7N8X Deluxe was done with an standard AMD Athlon XP 2000+ processor, two CMX512-2700C2 512MB PC2700 memory modules from Cosair and a Western Digital WD800JB 80GB Caviar Special Edition running the Windows 2000 Professional operating system. Since the Athlon XP 2000+ was running at a 266 MHz frontside bus, the memory was synchronized to the bus speed thereby not using the full potential of the memory. The BIOS settings for the CPU and memory were set to Aggressive. The first benchmark used for comparison was FutureMark's PCMark2002, a free baseline benchmarking application. The scores were as follows:
Overall the CPU score was slightly above average compared to several other Athlon based boards. While not impressive, it is a slight performance boost of around 1-2% over similar configurations. The memory score was a bit more impressive with a 5% gain, but PCMark2002 uses very small memory blocks for testing so it doesn't really stress the memory and show off the dual-channel configuration. The disk performance is slightly below average but this is due to the lack of optimized IDE drivers for Windows 2000 and use of the basic Microsoft drivers instead. Users of XP can expect to see better drive performance. The other tests used for the performance evaluation were several tests of SiSoft Sandra benchmark suite. The scores for the particular tests were:
Here the results are much like those seen from PCMark2002. The scores were slightly better when compared to other AMD motherboard solutions, but nothing to really set it apart greatly. The memory results are very interesting as the scores are just below the theoretical maximum of 2.1 GB/s transfer rate of single channel PC2100 (266 MHz) memory rather than the 4.2 GB/s rate of the dual channel configuration. This is likely caused from small memory block testing similar to that seen in PCMark2002. Overclocking Support ASUS has provided a large range of overclocking settings in the A7N8X Deluxe motherboard. Most notable about the board is the power configurations. There is a wide range of control for the voltage settings available. Voltages can be adjusted for the Vcore, DDR reference voltage and AGP VDDQ. Frontside bus settings are available in 1, 3 and 5 Hz increments and range from 100 MHz up to 211 MHz. The highest bus settings are only attainable with a lot of effort through voltage tweaking and having the right parts necessary for cooling. While the memory bus can be adjusted in percentages higher and lower than the frontside bus, it doesn't really impact performance because the memory runs best synched to the frontside bus speed. A welcome addition is the independent AGP frequencies that allow for adjusting the performance or stability of the graphics card. For those who aren't familiar or comfortable with overclocking, ASUS also has some simple configurations that can be applied to the CPU and memory settings. The default setting of Optimal configures the system to run at baseline settings to ensure stability. The board also provides Aggressive settings for both the CPU and memory interfaces independently. During testing, the Aggressive settings provide very minimal performance increased but had no stability problems at all. Due to the lack of an unlocked Athlon CPU and necessary cooling arrangements, I was unable to test the actual overclocking ability of the motherboard, but the options are very impressive. Conclusions 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. |
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