A great motherboard for a home build job (Asus M2N-SLI)

Member Name: illogicology

Product:	Asus M2N-SLI
Date:	12/01/09 (51 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Lots of features, good build quality

Disadvantages: No bios update for new phenoms, nVidia chipset so no crossfire support

I recently used this motherboard in a home build and was very impressed. It is an incredibly well performance motherboard and fully featured.
Taking a socket AM2 or AM2+ processor, this motherboard will take the dual core athlon range, some older athlon/sempron processors and with the latest Bios updates it will take the Phenom line of CPUs. Unfortunately there has been no sign of a BIOS update allowing the use of the shiny new Phenom II processors with a much improved architecture and a heftier pricetag but we can hope. As it is, this is a very good board for an older dual or quad processor by AMD.
I have been using an Athlon 64 X2 since day one and have had no problems.

The motherboard also has 4 slots for DDR2 dual channel. It will take a maximum of 8GB so it is perfect for a 64bit operating system and rather than motherboards that only feature two DDR2 slots, you can fill the slots with a degree of flexibility.

Two PCI-e x16 slots are located on the motherboard as well as standard PCI slots and a short PCI-e slot.

It also includes onboard 8channel sound making this an ideal home theatre motherboard. There is an optical output for s/pdif and toslink capable receivers however if you are using Vista then there are known issues getting this to support multichannel surround.

This board is also SLI capable fore those of you planning on wedging an extra graphics card in, the PCI-e slots are also located far enough apart to allow for two dual space cooler cards to be connected.

All in all this is an excellent motherboard for any home build job. The bios is well featured with support for AMD cool and quiet and fan control. There are also well marked built in overclocking settings that are easy to use and will benefit most users.

Summary: Good board, no major flaws so long as you check compatibility with other hardware.

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