The deluxe is feature rich (Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe)

Member Name: codiak

Product:	Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe
Date:	15/10/07 (157 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: great build quality and lots of features

Disadvantages: slightly restrictive around the CPU

Hi there, I bought this board about a year ago to replace my fried Aopen Board. I got a good price as they are no longer top of the range boards.

So what makes the A7N8X-E Deluxe a worthwhile buy, well if you are looking for a board which oozes the build quality and features of a Rolls Royce then this is the board for you, bearing in mind that you can only go as high as an Athon XP 3200+ or a Sempron 2800+

When I unpacked the board I noticed that there was sufficient room around the CPU socket but maybe not enough for some overclocking coolers, an experience point to note here being that some cases have their power supply right above where the processor would be which can make cooler fitting a nightmare, so either fit it outside the case or remove you PSU before you start.

That aside though this board has 3 DIMM sockets to support up to 3 GB of ram, you can also install memory in matched pairs to use dual channel mode. Memory supported DDR 266, 333 and 400.

This board supports both IDE hard disks and SATA hard disk, the SATA controller also supports RAID, and I can say the silicon image chipset provides excellent throughput.
Network connectivity is provided by the onboard nforce 10/100mb LAN adapter and a Yukon marvel 1000mb (gigabit) LAN adapter. You can also purchase a special wireless device to fit on to the board to provide wireless networking.

The installed chipset is an NVIDIA nForce 2 Ultra 400 supporting blistering disk access and exceptional memory performance. The best chipset around for Athlon XP
Sound is provided by the NVIDIA Soundstorm audio processor providing excellent 5.1 surround sound, I actually replaced my Audigy 1 card with this as it was so much better. Besides the soundstorm doesn’t use the PCI bus it uses the native hyper transport link direct to the main chipset, this gives the sound processing an edge as there is more bandwidth available.
From my own experience of using this board I can say that the build quality is superb, and the installation was straight forward with no gotchas, just take your time and follow the instructions if you do get stuck

The BIOS is very customizable and will suit all levels of user, however id you are a hardcore over clocker their are no options for upping the voltage to the Northbridge. (If you don't know what that meant then don’t worry you wont need to play with it)
I now use this board in y spare rig as I moved up to Athlon 64 as can’t bring myself to part with it.

All in all a great board for almost everyone.

Summary: Great value for money

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