Review misplaced, this review is for M2N32-SLI Deluxe (Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe)

Member Name: TH73

Product:	Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe
Date:	24/07/06 (176 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fantastic feature set, excellent bundle, wide variety of CPU's available

Disadvantages: Very choosy on RAM, BIOS issues, non-standard sound chip

Please delete this review, or move it to the right product!

THIS REVIEW IS FOR M2N32-SLI Deluxe

This is by far the best motherboard I have ever owned. While the AM2 socket is very new, AMD has already released a great range of CPUs for it, which means you can start with a low-end Sempron at less than £50, and upgrade it when needed to the very highest-end Athlon64 dual core CPU's.

The dual PCI-Express x16 slots enables SLI with up to 4 GPU's by having two dual GPU cards, such as the 7950GX2, installed. This means you can buy the best possible GeForce card available and later upgrade by adding another identical card, a great way to prolong the life of your system. Thanks to the nForce 590 chipset, both PCI-Express x16 run at full speed in SLI mode, unlike other motherboards like the M2N-SLI which slows down to 2*x8 when running SLI.

On-board features are too many to mention, see the specs for full details, but some of the more unusual ones are:

* 8 SATA2 ports (9 internal, 1 external), meaning you can add as many disks as you can possibly dream of, why they have added so many is a bit of a mystery to me. 6 of them are from the nVidia chipset while the remaining 2 are with a separate Silicon Image chip, why they bothered with that I can only guess about, but maybe because it supports the external connector.

* 7.1 channel audio (with front panel connector), but here is a small problem, ASUS have decided to use a non-standard sound chip which so far doesn't have very good drivers (they are still Beta and unsigned), and doesn't support EAX so no hardware accelleration of 3D Audio in games. This is a bit of a disappointment but of course you can always get an external sound card.

* 10 USB ports (4 on backplane and 6 on headers), however, if you get the version with built-in Wireless LAN two of those are taken by the WLAN card. You can always remove the WLAN card if you don't need it, or maybe even use it in another motherboard with a compatible USB header.

The bundle is of the standard Asus quality with everything you could possibly need in terms of headers and cables, on the software side there is just a driver CD and some InterVideo OEM software that will never get installed on my system since much better alternatives exist.

One curious little thing is a header where you can attach all the front panel connectors (speaker, power LED, reset button etc.) and then plug them all into the motherboard at once. This is really useful if you need to remove the motherboard from the case, and also because if you have a crammed case it can be a real hassle to get the 2-pin connectors on and see what you are doing.

One big issue with this board is RAM compatibility. The board supports 800MHz DDR2, but when using this fast RAM the board is extremely picky about what RAM it will work with. I suspect the BIOS defaults are not kind to some brands. However, after RMA'ing a set of Kingston HyperX sticks I got Corsair instead and that worked great at 800MHz, plus the "enhanced performance profile" of the Corsair modules are readily usable in the BIOS to enable overclocking.

On the overclocking front, the BIOS has more options than I've ever seen before, this is partly due to new features on the AM2 platform, but everything is very easily tunable and CPU clock can be increased in steps of 1MHz. Other BIOS features make sure that the derived clocks for e.g. the HyperTransport bus don't get too far out of spec even when you are overclocking, very useful when you are trying to gradually increase the clock to see how high you can go.

All in all this is an excellent motherboard that I strongly recommend. It is packed with features and is highly upgradeable and future proof.

Summary
Great motherboard with unbeatable upgradeability and OC possibilities

Summary: Great motherboard with unbeatable upgradeability and OC possibilities

Processing/Quality:
Reliability:
Installation:
Speed:
Features: