ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe - motherboard - ATX - nForce4 SLI X16

...the top 3 manufacturers Abit ASUS or Gigabyte. So it was with this product.
I had used the DFI-LAn party board for a few months, and with the range of BIOS options it became a bit of a nightmare when overclocking (Escpecially if you are a bit of a novice). So I opted for this beast with its true 16x SLI capability, and passive cooling.
I've got it installed with a thermaltake Bigwater 745 water cooler on top of a 3800+ dual core chip, ...
.../> As with all the ASUS SLI boards the 16x slots are well spaced so boards with non reference coolers can be fitted(Gigabyte and Abit boards tend to be a lot closer and therfore a lot hotter).
A good range of utilities and backup software is included on the disc, with the AI booster you can overclock in windows.
This is an expensive board but is at the top of the AMD 939 socket motherboards, and with the advent of the AM2 board being ... more

When it comes to motherboards I generally stick to the top 3 manufacturers Abit ASUS or Gigabyte. So it was with this product.
I had used the DFI-LAn party board for a few months, and with the range of BIOS options it became a bit of a nightmare when overclocking (Escpecially if you are a bit of a novice). So I opted for this beast with its true 16x SLI capability, and passive cooling.
I've got it installed with a thermaltake Bigwater 745 water cooler on top of a 3800+ dual core chip, and dual Leadtek 7800GT's. With 2Gb of Hyper X memory, anything you throw at it is a breeze.
The BIOS is one of the AI life series, so if you are an overclocking novice, it has presets from 3 to 20%+, which will take care of all the voltages and FSB multipliers. However as with all these boards if you are beyond a novice you have plenty of manual options to set CPU, memory, graphics timings.
With the water cooler installed the board does get hot, as the heatpipes rely on the CPU cooler to dissapate the heat. There is however a clip on fan for the top most heat sink which does get rid of the heat. (A side case fan also does the job).
As with all the ASUS SLI boards the 16x slots are well spaced so boards with non reference coolers can be fitted(Gigabyte and Abit boards tend to be a lot closer and therfore a lot hotter).
A good range of utilities and backup software is included on the disc, with the AI booster you can overclock in windows.
This is an expensive board but is at the top of the AMD 939 socket motherboards, and with the advent of the AM2 board being pretty much the same as this, it shows they got it right with this one!! 

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