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Summary

Note: You may also want to read our review of the Asus A8N32-SLI as it is the updated version of this board with a newer chipset and passive cooling.

This is a summary review of the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard.  For the full review, with all our detailed layout, features and performance analysis, click on to our Expert review pages. 

The Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard starts the trend of what surely is going to catch on in the enthusiast PC market: SLI motherboards powered by the nForce4 chipset. 

The Asus A8N-SLI motherboards sports an impressive amount of features including SLI GPU support, which implies PCI Express as well.  There is support for 8 SATA channels, 2 IDE channels and RAID on all of them.  There are a pair of Gigabit network connections on-board, as well as 8-channel audio powered by a Realtek codec.  Asus even includes the entire suite of cables and accessories you need to take advantage of all the components they have included on the board, such as 8 SATA power and data cables, headers for addition USB and Firewire slots and more.  If you want the full specifications list, click over to our detailed review with that and even more information on this product. 

The board layout is a bit different as well from your standard AMD platform thanks to the SLI support.  The small card you see between the two x16 PCI Express slots is used to transform the board from a single card board to a dual card board.  More detail on that process can also be found in our detailed review; there is just a lot of information in this article that can't be compressed to a single page. 

Below are a couple of benchmarks on the motherboard. Note that we did not use a SLI setup to compare the A8N-SLI to other AMD motherboards. Instead we are using a  single GPU setup we have used on all our board reviews so that allk platforms are on an equal playing field.  We'll have a follow-up to this that focuses closely on SLI performance.

As you can see, the performance of the motherboard itself is pretty much on par with what we expect from AMD-based PCI Express platforms.  With the memory controller in the CPU instead of the chipset now, motherboard and chipset vendors are looking elsewhere to find features to make their options stand out to the buyer.  Some of those features are the same ones we mentioned above.

While I did have some initial problems with the A8N-SLI motherboard, they were quickly worked out by myself and the Asus teams (both the US and Taiwan branches) overnight while I was polishing this review.  Asus assures me the issues I experienced, that were now fixed in the latest BIOS revision I received, will also be fixed in any retail boards that make it on the shelves this year.

With that, I am going to award the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard with our "Gold Award" that is bestowed on motherboards that we feel more than comfortable recommending to our readers. This also leaves our "Editor's Choice" award for the best of the "Gold" winners in the future once we have all the competing products in hand.  Don't forget to check out our complete and detailed review of this board as well, with much more data and analysis on the features and performance. 

Be sure to use our price checking engine to find the best prices on the Asus A8N-SLI, and anything else you may want to buy!

Click here for the Detailed Review