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You have heard all about it and now you can try it for yourself. An SLI capable motherboard has hit the market. The ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe with the Nforce 4 SLI chipset gives you this great performance option. More than that though, Its a great upgrade path if you don't want to utilize the SLI right away. The A8N SLI Deluxe is a motherboard for the socket 939 Athlon 64 or Athlon 64 FX.

Lets delve a little more into SLI so you know exactly what your looking at. SLI is Scan Line Interleave. The idea is the the load or work a graphics card has to do is split between two cards of the same type and you get theoretically twice the performance. The real beauty is that two lesser cards put together can often still be cheaper and reach the same performance of a top of the range cards. On another note you can SLI two top of the range cards if you have that type of money to throw around to get a real beastie performer. SLI capable cards are out there but make sure they are capable before making that purchase. To learn a little more on SLI check out our own SLI article

Besides the obvious advantage of the SLI, the ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe has more to offer as well. Firstly being an SLI solution and SLI only exists on PCI express platforms, you get the latest up to date PCI express bus with 2 16x slots for your graphics cards, 2 PCI express 1x slots for the standard PCI express components. You also get 3 standard PCI slots for your existing PCI components to migrate into. You also get a massive 10 USB 2.0 ports, 4 on the back plate and the rest headers for easy expansion. In terms of drives you get 2 ATA 133/100/66/33 ports and 4 S-ATA ports with RAID 0, 1, 0+1 and RAID 5 functions. Also you get 4 DIMM slots or massive expansion capability of up to 4Gb of RAM. There is also the things we can now consider as standard on motherboards. So you will get the Gigabit LAN chip, Firewire and 8 channel sound.

The board itself is laid out quite neatly and every attention has been made to make the 16x PCI express slots far enough apart to keep graphics cards with even the bulkiest cooling solutions onboard far enough apart to be comfortable. The downside is that if you have such a setup with bulky fans and heatsinks on your 1x PCI express slots could be rendered unusable. Still on this note the Northbridge has an active cooling solution. Extra fans can create extra noise inside your system and with the possibility of two graphics cards with active cooling and power supply already in there, you would imagine this is a bad idea. However I can see why ASUS has done this with the A8N SLI. The active cooling solution is smaller than a big passive heatsink, this way there is little chance that it will interfere with your graphics card setup.

Software

Besides the nice suite of ASUS software that comes bundled with this board, you also get copies of WinDVD Creator Platinum 2, WinDVD Platinum version 6, DVD Copy 2 and Discmaster 2. The Asus suite of software contains programs and utilities to help with the running of you ASUS system some of these we will take a quick look at now.

AI NOS

I'm sure you have heard the expression NOS, meaning Nitrous Oxide. This is the gas that releases a sudden burst of speed out of car engines. AI NOS is obviously not a gas, but it is geared to give your computer a sudden burst of speed. This is more than a simple overclocking utility AI NOS delivers that burst of extra speed when you need it. AI NOS is automatic, it detect when you need that extra speed and provides it directly to you. It is delay free so as soon as you need the power it will be there.

ASUS Q-Fan

A simple utility but very useful none the less. Q-fan automatically adjusts the fan speed of your CPU fan and you chassis fan in order to strike the balance between system noise and a safe CPU temperature.

ASUS Crash Free BIOS 2

The Crash Free BIOS now comes with a support CD that contains the BIOS recovery feature. Users can reboot there PC with the recovery CD when they don't have a bootable disk is not available. Some new PC don't even have a floppy disk drive these days so a bootable CD is a welcome relief.

Chipset Features

Like we have mentioned this version of the nforce 4 chipset has support for multiple PCI Express graphics cards working side by side to increase graphics performance and provide an easy upgrade path. (SLI compatible GPU's only)
 

PCI Express is the latest bus system you may of heard about. It doesn't only serve graphics cards though. You also get PCI 1x slots for up and coming PCI Express components to replace the standard PCI. Don't worry though It also supports standard PCI so migration should be easy.

NV Active Armour - You may well of guessed that Active Armour is a security feature. Active armour is a hardware firewall that protects your network from hackers, virus' and Spyware while still letting you have the full potential of your Gigabit network connection. Also being a hardware solution you can relieve your CPU of another duty.

S-ATA has been around for a while now but Nvidia has taken it a step further by using the next standard for drives. S-ATA 3G/s doubles the available bandwidth of the previous S-ATA standard and provides better data recovery.

Nvidia Ntune - Ntune is a performance tuning utility that gives you control over clock speeds voltages, fan speeds and bus speeds. Ntune also offers you benchmarking software so you have something to check your tweaks against for those of you that like to play with settings. The rest my like the automatic features that can be enabled. How about as soon as you enter a DVD into the system to watch the PC automatically switches to quiet mode cutting the fans down allowing you watch the movie in quiet without overheating. As well as tuning Ntune also acts as a hardware monitor, everything you can change Ntune will monitor for you so you can always check you are running safe.

Motherboard Specifications

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