Asus A8N-SLI Premium Grange-over-Sands

The Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe has been a CPC favourite ever since we first reviewed it at the end of last year; it's also on the Elite list as our Socket 939 motherboard of choice. Asus has now cooked up a new revision with an even grander name. We hope the company gets to the end of the A8N series soon, because it's going to be hard to find a word that improves on 'Premium.'

Like the Deluxe version, the A8N-SLI Premium is based on the Nvidia nForce4 SLI chipset and, like its illustrious ancestor, the A8N-SLI Premium is well laid out. It has the same wide spacing between the two high-speed PCI-E slots, which enables better airflow to a pair of graphics cards and allows more room for oversized HSFs or waterblocks.

There are some differences between the Premium and the Deluxe versions of the A8N-SLI that are immediately noticeable. The fiddly PCB switch for alternating between SLI and single graphics card modes has been replaced by a BIOS setting. This allows you to upgrade to SLI without having to do much more than plonk in another graphics card. In between the two high-speed PCI-E slots, there's a 1x PCI-E slot and a 4x PCI-E slot. There aren't many motherboards with a 4x PCI-E slot, but unless you're really into RAID controllers, you probably won't be that excited by it. Still, compared with the two 1x PCI-E slots on the Deluxe, it's a nice option to have.

The biggest difference between the Deluxe and the Premium is that the chipset is now cooled using a heatpipe (or 'AI Cool-pipe', to use official Asus-speak). When we first reviewed the A8N-SLI Deluxe, the chipset was cooled by a heatsink, but Deluxe models now have a fan cooling the nForce4 SLI silicon. This fan can get noisy, especially if you're overclocking and overvolting the board, but the Premium's passive cooling totally eliminates fans from the board. The heatpipe runs from the chipset and up to a large heatsink on the voltage regulators, by the CPU socket. While this means that the board is silent, we had to make sure that the chipset cooler was in the path of a fan while testing, so you'll also need a case with good airflow for this board.

The A8N-SLI Premium's features are similar to those of the Deluxe; there's dual Gigabit LAN, 8-channel surround sound, two EIDE ports, plus eight RAID-capable S-ATA ports, four of which are S-ATA II compliant.

As we've introduced our new benchmarks for this issue, we also updated the test kit for both Intel and AMD motherboards. We now test Socket 939 boards using the Athlon 64 X2 4200+. The A8N-SLI Premium's performance at stock speeds is impressive, but you'd expect that from a top-of-the-range chipset such as nForce4 SLI.

The A8N-SLI Deluxe was an excellent overclocker, managing a maximum FSB of 330MHz, and the Premium's BIOS is well set up too. The voltages are the same; you can stuff a ferocious 3V through the RAM, but only 1.55V into the CPU. Overall, the DFI Lanparty NF4 SLI-DR is still the better bet for hardcore overclockers.

Dropping the multiplier on our test chip, we managed to get a maximum FSB of 310MHz from the Premium. This is still a good amount of potential, although it's notably less than the Lanparty's 425MHz.

We ran the overclocked tests with a 250MHz FSB, and the multiplier of our Athlon 64 X2 4200+ dropped from 11 to 10.5. This bumped the speed of both cores to 2.63GHz, and boosted our new 2D benchmarks by 10 per cent. The frame rate in Far Cry leapt up from 63.8fps to 66fps.



CONCLUSION

The A8N-SLI Premium is a great motherboard, but then so was the A8N-SLI Deluxe, which is £28 cheaper. The BIOS switch for SLI mode is nice but it's the sort of feature that will probably be used once, if ever. The passive cooling is a good idea, but adds to the cost, and it does mean you need excellent case cooling. For the moment, the Deluxe remains a slightly better bet.

Author: Phil Hartup

Asus A8N-SLI Premium