Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe: NVIDIA Dual x16 for the Athlon 64
by Wesley Fink on November 6, 2005 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Memory Stress Testing
The Asus easily handled 2-2-2-7-1T timings at stock speed, as do almost any of the current boards for AMD Socket 939 from NVIDIA, SiS, VIA, and ULi. The board was completely stable at "Auto" voltage or the lowest "2.6V" memory voltage setting.
*7T was determined by MemTest86 benchmarks to deliver the widest bandwidth with the NVIDIA nForce4 chipset. While the board would operate at tRAS of 5T or lower, all benchmarks were run at 7T for best performance.
Tests with all four DIMM slots populated on the A8N32-SLI required a 2T Command Rate with 4 DIMMs in two dual channels. The 2-2-2-7 timings were still completely stable at minimum voltage. This is the pattern seen on every other top-performing Socket 939 board, except the recently tested ATI RDX200. The DFI ATI can actually defy the laws of AMD and run 4 DS DIMMs at a 1T Command Rate to about DDR405. The performance of the Asus is completely competitive with other top-line NVIDIA chipset motherboards for Socket 939.
The Asus easily handled 2-2-2-7-1T timings at stock speed, as do almost any of the current boards for AMD Socket 939 from NVIDIA, SiS, VIA, and ULi. The board was completely stable at "Auto" voltage or the lowest "2.6V" memory voltage setting.
| Stable DDR400 Timings - 4 DIMMs (4/4 DIMMs populated) |
|
| Clock Speed: | 200MHz |
| CAS Latency: | 2.0 |
| RAS to CAS Delay: | 2T |
| RAS Precharge: | 7T* |
| Precharge Delay: | 2T |
| Command Rate: | 1T |
| Stable DDR400 Timings - 4 DIMMs (4/4 DIMMs populated) |
|
| Clock Speed: | 200MHz |
| CAS Latency: | 2.0 |
| RAS to CAS Delay: | 2T |
| RAS Precharge: | 7T* |
| Precharge Delay: | 2T |
| Command Rate: | 2T |
Tests with all four DIMM slots populated on the A8N32-SLI required a 2T Command Rate with 4 DIMMs in two dual channels. The 2-2-2-7 timings were still completely stable at minimum voltage. This is the pattern seen on every other top-performing Socket 939 board, except the recently tested ATI RDX200. The DFI ATI can actually defy the laws of AMD and run 4 DS DIMMs at a 1T Command Rate to about DDR405. The performance of the Asus is completely competitive with other top-line NVIDIA chipset motherboards for Socket 939.
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deeltje - Saturday, November 5, 2005 - link
________________________________________________________________________________________I've been waiting for this board for over 2 weeks now and it still isn't available anywhere in europe.
So i would love to get this board shipped from USA to The Netherlands (where i live).
Does anyone know a good USA Computershop that has these boards in stock and accept Mastercard payments!?!?!?!?
I don't care about the shippingcosts, as long as they can ship FAST :)
________________________________________________________________________________________
Tanclearas - Friday, November 4, 2005 - link
If we're supposed to upgrade to new drivers to take advantage of improvements, Nvidia needs to seriously work on their driver upgrades, especially the platform drivers. To avoid problems, we have to use a third-party driver cleaner. The only users that seem to get NAM working are those that do a fresh install of Windows. Any attempt to upgrade drivers and enable NAM results in BSOD.This has been brought up before, with AT staff saying that it would be looked into if we could point to information about the problems. Users posted links to forum threads of users experiencing the problem, and there have been more threads since Nvidia released new drivers, but still we wait to hear any follow-up from AT or Nvidia.
Brian23 - Friday, November 4, 2005 - link
seriously.I'm running 6.66 forceware drivers right now. I'm thinking about formatting so I can get that 17% increase from 6.82. However, I have an ATI card. Is the performance increase due to the forceware drivers, or the graphics drivers? Or is it from the combination of the two?
Either way, we need a way to upgrade the drivers safely without all the crap of reformatting.
Wesley Fink - Saturday, November 5, 2005 - link
The 6.82 platform drivers are officially just for Dual X16. The latest platform driver for the regular nForce4/SLI chipset is 6.70. The video drivers that boost performance are the 8x.xx series. The released version on the nVidia website is 81.85 which can be used to improve performance of all recent nVidia video cards. There is also a Beta 81.87 floating around.bob661 - Friday, November 4, 2005 - link
Aren't the 6.82's for the x16 motherboards only?psychobriggsy - Friday, November 4, 2005 - link
Thanks for the review.This is a really nice looking motherboard. The passive cooling is very much welcomed, and the 8-phase power is interesting, and if it saves power that's good.
I hope that nVidia sort out their audio woes soon however. I look at my >30 month old nForce2 system and that's got way better integrated audio. On a $200 motherboard, is the dolby fee really an issue?
I could only see one SATA connector for the SI SATA.
3 PCI slots is nice for backwards compatibility, but in the long run things will emerge for PCIe, and the x4 slot is great and all (esp. for a decent SATA RAID card, then again, there's 6 fricking SATA ports already on the motherboard), but would it have done much harm to have another PCIe slot in place of one of the PCI slots? As long as the middle PCI slot was left for a decent audio card anyway.
How are the Firewire, SATA and Gigabit controllers connected? Via PCI or PCIe?
How does the power draw at the socket compare with other solutions?
cyberfrog4646 - Friday, November 4, 2005 - link
I've read a bunch of complaints on the recent Asus boards that the chipset fans are quite loud and have been breaking down. Is that a potential problem on this board?Perfomance to cost wise, is their any reason to choose the Asus over the DFI board?
Zebo - Friday, November 4, 2005 - link
BTW all you got to do is replace chipset fan with a passive chipset heat sink on any asus' budget boards... like $5.. I do anyway on any board ( I cut stock heat sinks in quarters on my table saw). Can't stand those 6000+ rpm whinners.. that particular high pitched tone is really ear pierceing to me.Capt Caveman - Friday, November 4, 2005 - link
Umm, this motherboard doesn't have any chipset fans but uses passive heatpipes for cooling. Did you read the review or look at the pics?cyberfrog4646 - Friday, November 4, 2005 - link
HAHAHAH, whoops, i just looked at the benchmarks and conclusion. I thought the the pipe was for the cpu based on the opening picture. Ah well, thanks for the info.