Asus A8N-SLi Premium vs A8N32-SLi Deluxe

Ghostwater · Post by **Ghostwater** » Sat Oct 08, 2005 12:45 pm

Okay, I'm building my first PC and I was ready to go with the A8N Premium until Asus announced their new motherboard. It's supposed to run cooler and looks to have a better heatpipe. I also like the external SATA port. I don't really need the SLi but I like the features on the Nforce4 Motherboards (esp the Firewall).

My question is, are the new features worth the extra money (~$50 CDN) and hassle (I have to order from a US online retailer)?

Live · Post by **Live** » Sat Oct 08, 2005 3:24 pm

This might help you decide:

http://www.tweaktown.com/document.php?d ... 13&dPage=1

- Pros
Packed full of features
Roomy SLI ports
3 x PCI slots
Heat Pipe Cooling
Future-proof design
Good overclocker
Great bundle with in the motherboard
AMD Athlon X2 support out of the box
No SLI selector adapter anymore

- Cons
X16 performance is up and down
No pointing upgrading unless you’re an ultra high quality and high resolution gamer

The A8N32-SLI is for people who upgrade their graphics card regularly but not their motherboard and want the highest resolution with extreme AA and AF settings and is not for people who don’t venture past 1600 x 1200 with AA or AF turned off. In other words, it’s for extreme gamers who are really going to want to push as much data through the PCI Express slots as possible.

nutbar · Post by **nutbar** » Sun Oct 09, 2005 8:08 pm

The Premium is probably fine. It's also nice to get a more mature setup for your first build. Mature meaning it's had a few BIOS revisions and some bugs have been worked out.

That 32X has a new chip on it that apparently needs additional cooling, I wonder what the heck it is? The non 32x SLI boards just have one "chipset" chip that needs active cooling.

ozdoc · Post by **ozdoc** » Sun Oct 09, 2005 10:44 pm

Okay, I'm building my first PC and I was ready to go with the A8N Premium until Asus announced their new motherboard. It's supposed to run cooler and looks to have a better heatpipe. I also like the external SATA port. I don't really need the SLi but I like the features on the Nforce4 Motherboards (esp the Firewall).

The Asus SLI premium comes with a PCI slot adaptor which gives you two external SATA ports with one molex power port.
Also, see: http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewto ... highlight=

Trust me, don't get the premium just for it's firewall.
It might be worth the price of admission for it's fanless NB, but not for the NVIDIA firewall....

Live · Post by **Live** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 12:52 am

nutbar wrote:That 32X has a new chip on it that apparently needs additional cooling, I wonder what the heck it is? The non 32x SLI boards just have one "chipset" chip that needs active cooling.

The new SPP chipset is for the new PCIe lanes added.

Ghostwater · Post by **Ghostwater** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 9:35 pm

Thanks for your replies. I've decided to go with the SLI-Premium

noac · Post by **noac** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 12:02 am

Ghostwater wrote:Thanks for your replies. I've decided to go with the SLI-Premium

If money is an issue Im guessing the price on the premium will drop, more, when A8N32 is in stock. I wouldn't look at this mobo so much for the x32 pci-e but for the other features.

And btw I a factory passive mobo isnt your priority there are other mobos that are just as good and alot cheaper.

fred9 · Post by **fred9** » Tue Oct 18, 2005 3:39 pm

NOAC,
which passive MB's are just as good and a lot less $$?

noac · Post by **noac** » Tue Oct 18, 2005 11:37 pm

fred9 wrote:NOAC,
which passive MB's are just as good and a lot less $$?

Actually my point was, if the mobo didn't have to be passive from factory he could do that himself with the zalman hs. That would give him alot more choices.

But looking at other passive mobos Id suggest Gigabyte, they are considerably cheaper and evidently, according to several reviews, just as good. However I think one has to be ready to replace the paste oneself since they seem to have very sloppy umpa loompas working there.

fred9 · Post by **fred9** » Wed Oct 19, 2005 12:32 pm

NOAC,
thank you, I think you are saying that ZALman has chipset heatsinks. I'll look into that. As can tell I'm new to all this. I do plan to build a new PC soon. Not a gamer, but I want quiet and plan to (try to) install ATI HDTV.
Steve

noac · Post by **noac** » Thu Oct 20, 2005 5:53 am

Just incase someone has missed it:

http://hothardware.com/viewarticle.cfm?articleid=739

Review on A8N32-SLI Deluxe. Most interesting in the review is the SLI-AA performance in Far Cry:

"In the immortal words of someone famous (we're not sure who), "stop the press"! Those FarCry scores above are actually very impressive indeed. Doing the math quickly for you, what you're looking at is a 67% performance increase in 8X SLI-AA mode and a 58% increase in 16X SLI-AA mode. Clearly NVIDIA SLI-AA blending processes are fairly bandwidth intensive when it comes to the frame blending operations that occur across PCIe Graphics links. In fact, it is clear now that SLI-AA is undoubtedly even more system bandwidth-limited than it is GPU limited."

ckpurvis · Post by **ckpurvis** » Sun Nov 13, 2005 8:07 am

The HotHardware article, dated October 18, reports some pretty impressive speed gains on the A8N32 SLI. I read a later article on AnandTech, dated November 6, however, that pointed out some problems with the HotHardware review. This centered around an outdated (and somewhat incompatible) driver revision being used in the earlier HH review. This caused a performance penalty on the reference A8N SLI, which made the A8N32 appear to have the 50% or so performance boost.

In fact, when the correct drivers are used, the difference in something closer to the 5-15 percent range. The bad news is the A8N32 isn't the performance monster it first appeared. The good news is that the A8N SLI has better performance than the review initially indicated. HotHardware has updated their review to reflect this updated information, so if you read it on October, you may want to look over the new article for updated benchmarks.

I'm doing a new system build, myself, and really liked the look of the A8N32, but I expect I'll go with the A8N SLI Premium -- although I like the look of that 8-phase power delivery system. Allegedly, it reduces the power consumption of the CPU by around 10%, and that really gets my attention. I don't know, however, if I can justify the price premium; at this time, the A8N32 is sitting at around US $250, while the A8N SLI Premium is closer to US $165. (newegg prices)

References:
Anandtech review:
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2589&p=1

klankymen · Post by **klankymen** » Sun Nov 13, 2005 4:07 pm

one thing i can mention with my SLI-Premium, it has external (rear) sata ports.

however I advise against this board, as it has severe instability issues (for me, and also for others), crashing whenever the system is put under some load.