Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe Review

[OldeCrow]

Asus A8N-SLI extended use / complete system review.

First I would like to warn people that this review is a little harsh. While the hardware I?m using certainly benchmarks and performs well it?s far from an ideal user experience. If you are a novice at building computers and the A8N-SLI was your first build I would like to say on behalf of all more experienced builders out there, I?m sorry, if you survived this build the next one will be piece of cake.

Also I would like to say that I knew going into this build that there were going to be problems. This is first generation hardware and first generation hardware never performs as advertised. In fact I don't build machines for customers with first generation hardware. It?s simply not cost effective given all the support issues that arise from it. I was surprised however that two of the newer most advertised hardware features were not functional enough to use. Most notably Cool-n-Quiet features were not stable enough for a serious work environment and the hardware firewall.

I was also supprised to find that out of all the hardware reviews I have read on the internet about nForce4 motherboards only one review mentioned anything about the firewall problems which seem to be the most common issue people have. and the solution that review site came up with was a driver/firewall update from Nvidia that isn't available to the public (unless the new beta 7.11 drivers have the fix in them).

I guess hardware review sites don't like to bite the hand that feeds them free hardware.

I am not entirely sure weather this generation of hardware is really more problematic or if users have simply realized they can use the internet to share their experiences and voice their problems. Whatever the case there is lots of discussion about the problems with this board and nForce4 motherboards in general.

Ok on to the review, I?m going to skip inserting the pointless photos into this review but you can look at the components and the assembled machine here:

http://www.crescent-pc.com/eyecandyXP/Olde...sNest/Build.htm

Assembly was straight forward and painless although I initially installed the components in the standard Enermax case visible in the components photos I moved it into a double wide server case to provide more room for drives and allow for better cooling plus its just ?kinda? cool and these double wide server cases are not much more expensive than regular ones if you have the room for it. The first thing I did was add an 80mm fan to the top of the case over the motherboard side, this provides much better cooling since there isn?t an exhaust fan on the motherboard side of the case. Later I?m going to re cut the hole for a 120mm fan since they are quieter than the high flow 80mm I have in it now.

The A8N-SLI shipped with the SLI selector card set for dual cards. This isn?t a problem but the manual says it ships set to single card so pay attention to the position of the card.

The SLI selector card is also very easy to seat incorrectly so you need be extra sure its seated if you need to switch it.

With the SLI selector card set for dual I proceeded to Install the pair of XFX 6600gt PCI-X video cards (Model number PVT43GNDF7) and connect them together with the supplied SLI connector card.

Next I installed the ATHLON 64 3500+ and the retail heat sink that it came with.

Then came the OCZ pc3200 2x512 1gig kit (OCZ4001024ELDCPER2-K) this is the nice low latency stuff 2.2.2.5 rated up to 2.9 volt for you overclockers.

After installing a 36 gig Western Digital Raptor 10k rpm drive I decided it wasn?t enough so I added a standard special edition 80gig for data and a 74 gig Raptor 10k rpm for the boot drive and used the 36gig as my swap drive for windows and there?s room left on the 36 gig for my system backup?s and other long term storage files.

I added A black DVD|SONY 16X DDU1613 DVD-ROM drive, a black DVD+/-RW 16X SONY DRU710A DVD-burner, a black Sony floppy drive, and a black 3 ? inch 7-n-1 USB card reader.

For the power supply I installed a 470watt Enermax 470WEG475AX-VE (w) SFMA2.0 the (w) specifies it?s the model with active PFC which is good.

That about covers the important stuff on to the first time startup!

The machine started and posted on the first try, just like it?s supposed to.

I entered bios and had a look around at the new stuff for nForce4 boards. After a little ?googling?, some reading up on the Asus site and the Nvidia site I had a little bit better understanding of some of the new stuff in bios and proceeded to disable the extra stuff I wouldn?t be using like the Silicon Image Sata controller, Marvell LAN, boot rom, 1394 fire wire, q-fan, cool-n-quiet, etc. qfan and cool-n-quiet still need some work before Ill consider using them full time. Cool-n-quiet is a new feature that throttles back your processor and motherboard when it?s not in use. It?s a good idea it should make the machine run cooler, use less energy, and extend the life of your system but I noticed that the system tends to get stuck throttled down which means your system is only running at about 50% its normal speed and required a restart to return to normal and q-fan just bothers me, I would rather know that the fans are spinning all the time than trust that the motherboard is slowing them down and speeding them up.

After installing windowsXP pro with service pack2 I installed the Motherboard drivers from the driver CD that came with the motherboard. No problems at all except you can?t use the cool-n-quiet software or features and use the AIBooster software at the same time. I opted to not install either of them just to keep it simple and if I want to over clock I would rather do it in bios than with software like AIBooster.

I also installed the Network access manager (Nvidia?s long winded name for the hardware firewall interface)

I installed the Nvidia 66.93 forceware drivers for the XFX6600gt?s without any trouble and enabled SLI. After a restart I went into the global driver settings in the Nvidia properties and set the cards to SLI multi gpu rendering and was done..

I installed Far Cry and had a couple issues that needed tinkering mostly the Far Cry update that I Forgot to do. Everything worked as expected I spent a week beating the game and then proceeded on to tuning up the machine.

Initially I experienced a few BSOD?s and mystery errors on restarts. Most notably kernel fault messages that were specific to Pentium pro processors, obviously a problem since this is an Athlon machine.

After a Bios upgrade to 1004 and a Motherboard driver update to version 6.39 and some tinkering with the Nvidia firewall the system seemed pretty much stable. Then I installed a bit torrent client and my system began restarting a few minutes into a download with the bit torrent client. After tracking the problem back to the Nvidia firewall I weighed the options, 50 meg of firewall applications running plus another 100 meg to a leaky firewall related app or, any other firewall, I uninstalled the Nvidia firewall.

The problem with the firewall seems to stem from an interrupt conflict between the Nvidia nic and the Nvidia sata controller and seems to create problems with both sata data and network stability. End users can avoid this by either not installing the Nvidia IDE drivers or not using the Nvidia nic or firewall or optionally you can disable devices and re enable devices until you get the two set where they are not sharing the same interrupt or if you don?t have a full compliment of SATA devices experiment with plugging your SATA devices into different SATA ports on the Motherboard . Perhaps a bios or driver update will fix this in the future. In my case I am still using the Nvidia nic without the firewall but I notice problems with moving large amounts of data occasionally so I will have to experiment with the above mentioned options and see if I can get it completely sorted out my self.

Then I got the wild hair to upgrade the Motherboard drivers to 6.53 when they came out and also opted to allow the installer to reinstall the firewall again. On a restart the firewall was ?goofey? the Nvidia nic was non functional and before I could attempt to diagnose the problem the sata drivers ate the boot sector off my drive and spit it out on the floor. ( I didn?t know this at the time)

So starting with a clean slate or so I thought I reinstalled windowsXP pro sp2 again, it was a difficult install and very unstable system from the start this time .. not knowing that the boot sector of my drive was messed up I looked at every other possible thing that could be causing a problem until finally I ran Norton disk doctor and it cried foul upon inspecting the boot sector.

After completely formatting my drive and reinstalling the system again I opted to start with the 6.39 motherboard drivers and the 71.81 forceware video card drivers from Asus, I heard a rumor that the Asus 71.81 drivers worked very well.

This time I didn?t bother with the Nvidia firewall either. I also went into bios and made some manual adjustments to my processor settings and memory settings since the motherboard was detecting my nice low latency memory at 2.5 3.3.5.

After manually setting my ht bus to 210mhz, my PCI express clock to 105mhz, the ht multiplier to 5x, the PCI clock to 33.3mhz and my memory to 2.2.2.5 1T @2.8 volts (this amounts to about a 5% over clock of the board and processor and rated spec on the memory) I restarted and ran a few burn in tests overnight to ensure stability. In the morning the Sandra2005I?ve since tried just about every combination of drivers and bios and the most stable configuration I can get with this hardware is the 1004 bios, 6.39 or 6.53 Motherboard drivers and as of this writing the 71.89 forceware video drivers. nd as of this writing the 71.89 forceware video drivers.

The newer versions of the bios fix some fringe power management issues and have improvements for people useing 4 dimms so if your only useing 2 dimms most users should be fine with the 1004 bios.

I upgraded from the 1004 bios to the 1007 bios and had problems with the bios remembering my manual settings for memory and processor. Also noticeably missing from the 1007 bios is the ?AUTO? option from most of the settings for memory and processor which makes things much more complicated for a novice who just wants to change what he knows how to change. As far as I can tell the only changes in newer bios after 1004 were for 4dimm configurations so if you?re using only two dims I advise stopping at the 1004 bios.

If your going to be flashing your bios learn to use the dos utility and flash from a bootdisk! I also recomend useing the command line switch's "/CP /CD" so the flash command would look something like this: awdflash 1008sd.bin /CP /CD. This forces the bios to reset the DMI tables and PNP tables and will save you a lot of headaches when flashing the bios!

The 6.53 Motherboard drivers are probably just fine but again I don?t see anything major fixed it them so unless your just curious stay with the 6.39 Motherboard drivers.

The 71.81 forceware drivers from the Asus website were rock solid stable and would allow me to over clock my cards very well. The 71.84 drivers from Nvidia had too many bugs to count and wouldn?t over clock well. The 71.89 drivers from Nvidia are rock solid stable, over clock well and perform a bit better than the 71.81 drivers from Asus so I would start out with the 71.89 drivers from Nvidia.

With the 71.89 forceware drivers installed I ran the coolbits registry tweak via NVTweak and also enabled a couple other goodies there mostly for observation with that out of the way I went to the Nvidia display properties and proceeded to experiment with clock settings. I settled on 590mhz for the Core clock and 1.18ghz for the Memory clock with a little better cooling solution I cUPDATE

Well I decided to experiment with trying to get interupts to move around a little and had very little success. it seems some of the interupts are specificly reserved for some of the motherboard hardware and even when they are disabled the system will still not use them for other hardware, namely the firewire and Marvell nic.

I experimented with disabling the Nvidia nic and enableing the Marvell nic on my system, I started by uninstalling the Nvidia nic from the device manager and then restarting and disabling the Nvidia nic in bios and enabling the Marvell nic in bios.

after windows loaded i installed the Marvell nic drivers. At this point something was noticably wrong with the network, chat clients wouldnt connect to the internet, since no firewall was installed that wasnt causing a problem. When I attempted to copy a couple of large files (700 meg each) via windows file and print shareing the network adaptor died before it finished the first file with no errors no bug checks nothing but dead air. After a forced push button restart I tried the file copy again with the same results. after examining the event viewer I noticed that there were still pieces of the Nvidia nic in the system but the nvidia installer was missing the option to uninstall the nvidia networking components at this point, I assume that they were removed when i uninstalled the Nvidia nic from the device manager but unfortunatly they were not quite removed entirely. I reinstalled the Nvidia motherboard drivers at this point but since the Nvidia nic wasnt present in the system now it didnt actually install the nic drivers. It seems the proper way to have started this little adventure was to uninstall the Nvidia nic drivers via the add remove programs before attempting to enable the Marvell nic. Too little too late I have work to do on this machine so after removing the Marvell drivers and disabling the Marvel nic and enabling the Nvidia nic in bios and reinstalling the Nvidia drivers (minus Nvidia firewall and the audio drivers cuz I like the realtek ones better) the system was back in working order again. although the Nvidia nic and Sata controler are still sharing an interupt they seem happy as long as the firewall isnt installed.. inConclusion:appy as long as the firewall isnt installed..

Conclusion:

I bought and paid for nForce 4 SLI chipset motherboard with the expectation that I was getting a functional hardware firewall. Unless BSOD?s and seemingly random restarts are considered a ?security feature? of the firewall I don?t think its quite ready for public consumption.

The Cool-n-Quiet Features are not entirely bug free but most users will probably see it working more often than not. Even when overclocking and gameing the Cool-n-Quiet features worked as advertised except as I mentioned My machine occasionally got stuck throttled down and required a restart to restore things to normal.

I got lucky with my choice of hardware that I added to it. Driver problems aside, everything I chose worked out of the box with the motherboard. Other users however are not so lucky.

Since I have not personally experienced hardware related issues I won?t discuss them but I would encourage shoppers to spend some time on the Nvidia website forums and on the unofficial FAQ for the Asus A8N-SLI at Hardware Analysis.

There are over 150 pages of questions and answers to common problems there and many of them apply to the nForce4 motherboards in general and you should have a good idea what hardware will work or won't work with the motherboard after reading up on both sites.

I am more than happy with the level of performance and stability that this hardware offers but my overall user experience has been poor. I?m not entirely sure what could be done to improve on that but I will say that driver development for the nForce4 chipset is much slower than I expected. I thought these problems seem to be pretty wide spread judging by the discussion on the internet and assumed they would be sorted out pretty soon. Here we are 6 months after nForce4 boards were made available to the public and there have only been two official releases of driver updates. I think it?s a safe bet that the firewall problems in particular are beyond the scope of driver updates and bios updates or it would have been fixed by now. NviMy advice to potential shoppers is:xing some problems with IDE/SATA drivers.

My advice to potential shoppers is:

1. Simply wait until SLI motherboards go second generation if you really want to avoid problems, this will give other hardware manufacturers time to improve compatibility issues too.

2. If you just can?t wait and must have an nForce4 motherboard right now, pick your hardware carefully!

Ok on to the good stuff pictures of a few benchmarks, Keep in mind I ran these benchmarks with a whole host of services and apps were running so on a clean system you can expect 5% to 10% or better improvements over what they show with the same clock settings.

http://www.crescent-pc.com/eyecandyXP/Olde...sNest/Build.htm

Edited June 2, 2005 by OldeCrow