nForce4 SLI Motherboards: Premium Performance at a Bargain Price
by Gary Key on January 3, 2006 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Final Words
The Asus A8N-SLI Premium deserves serious consideration if you are looking to build a feature-rich solution and can live with average overclocking performance compared to the more expensive DFI NF4 SLI-DR and Asus A8N32-SLI boards. The stock performance is equal to or better than either board at less cost. The board ships with an extensive accessory package and proved to be extremely stable in all test areas.
The Foxconn NF4SK8AA offers solid performance, very good stability, and an attractive feature set for the price. While the board produced average results, it was still very competitive with all offerings except in overclocking performance. The board is obviously well built and has a wonderful layout. The accessory package included was very good and ensures that most drive configurations can be handled without additional purchases.
The Albatron K8SLI is a very interesting board as it offers good performance with a minimal feature set. The board layout is very compact while still providing SLI capability. If you want to set up a LAN party system with SLI, then this board will allow you to use the smaller ATX cases without issue. The accessory package was minimal and included the standard IDE/Floppy drive cables, but only one SATA cable and power connector. In fact, the system does not come with the nForce4 RAID drivers on a floppy. Other websites have reported issues getting Windows XP to load on a RAID 0 partition. We were able to load XP on our Maxtor RAID 0 setup with the 6.70 drivers, but could not load the same image consistently on our WD Raptor configuration. We have contacted Albatron regarding this issue.
With that said, let's move on to our performance opinions regarding these boards.
In the video area, all boards offer and fully support SLI operation. The Asus board utilizes Pericom switches that allow the board to be configurable on the fly in either single X16 or Dual X8 PCI Express SLI Graphics mode. In our tests, the board was capable of differentiating between a single SLI capable video card, two SLI compatible video cards, and two video cards operating independently of each other. Asus includes their AI Selector software that allows you to set up your video card mode within Windows. You still need to use the SLI bridge on SLI compatible video cards and setup SLI mode within the NVIDIA drivers.
The Foxconn board utilizes the traditional paddle card method to switch between single and dual card mode. The Albatron board takes a slightly different approach with SLI switching. While Albatron's method is referred to as digital switching, in reality the two PCI-E x16 slots are pre-routed with 8 lanes each. This means that your single video card is only running in PCI-E x8 mode. We did not notice any performance degradation at our stock benchmark resolutions, but with the right application and resolution, you could see a performance drop.
In the on-board audio area, the Asus and Foxconn boards utilize the Realtek ALC850 while the Albatron board utilizes the Realtek ALC655 codec. The audio output of these codecs in the music, video, and gaming areas is sub-par while performance in games is decent. If you plan on playing on-line or value audio quality, we highly suggest a dedicated sound card at this time, but the onboard capabilities of these chipsets will satisfy the majority of office users.
In the storage area, the Asus board offers the greatest amount of storage options with additional SATA ports from the Silicon Image 3114R chipset. The Asus and Foxconn boards offer the standard ten NVIDIA USB ports while Albatron offers eight. Only Asus packages the external USB panels that allow you to take advantage of the USB connectors. You are limited to four USB ports on the Albatron and Foxconn boards unless you purchase the external panels. The Asus also offers two IEEE 1394a ports via the TI 1394a chipset. However, we believe that Firewire 800 should have been offered on the Asus board, since it is their premium offering.
In the performance area, the Albatron and Foxconn boards offer solid performance, very good stability, and decent feature sets for the price. In fact, if you are looking for basic SLI capability, then either board would be a bargain compared to the more expensive Asus board. At this time we would recommend the Foxconn board over the Albatron board due to the RAID 0 issues and a more extensive feature set for slightly more money. However, if NVIDIA SLI is not your priority, then we still recommend the Asus A8R-MVP as the value and performance leader for the AMD enthusiast.
The Asus A8N-SLI stood out from the rest of the field by consistently offering the best overall performance of the boards tested and, at times, exceeding those of the more expensive DFI and Asus flagship boards. If you require a fully featured board and can live with its overclocking capabilities, then the Asus board should be at the top of your list. In this case, a premium price does ensure premium performance.
The Asus A8N-SLI Premium deserves serious consideration if you are looking to build a feature-rich solution and can live with average overclocking performance compared to the more expensive DFI NF4 SLI-DR and Asus A8N32-SLI boards. The stock performance is equal to or better than either board at less cost. The board ships with an extensive accessory package and proved to be extremely stable in all test areas.
The Foxconn NF4SK8AA offers solid performance, very good stability, and an attractive feature set for the price. While the board produced average results, it was still very competitive with all offerings except in overclocking performance. The board is obviously well built and has a wonderful layout. The accessory package included was very good and ensures that most drive configurations can be handled without additional purchases.
The Albatron K8SLI is a very interesting board as it offers good performance with a minimal feature set. The board layout is very compact while still providing SLI capability. If you want to set up a LAN party system with SLI, then this board will allow you to use the smaller ATX cases without issue. The accessory package was minimal and included the standard IDE/Floppy drive cables, but only one SATA cable and power connector. In fact, the system does not come with the nForce4 RAID drivers on a floppy. Other websites have reported issues getting Windows XP to load on a RAID 0 partition. We were able to load XP on our Maxtor RAID 0 setup with the 6.70 drivers, but could not load the same image consistently on our WD Raptor configuration. We have contacted Albatron regarding this issue.
With that said, let's move on to our performance opinions regarding these boards.
In the video area, all boards offer and fully support SLI operation. The Asus board utilizes Pericom switches that allow the board to be configurable on the fly in either single X16 or Dual X8 PCI Express SLI Graphics mode. In our tests, the board was capable of differentiating between a single SLI capable video card, two SLI compatible video cards, and two video cards operating independently of each other. Asus includes their AI Selector software that allows you to set up your video card mode within Windows. You still need to use the SLI bridge on SLI compatible video cards and setup SLI mode within the NVIDIA drivers.
The Foxconn board utilizes the traditional paddle card method to switch between single and dual card mode. The Albatron board takes a slightly different approach with SLI switching. While Albatron's method is referred to as digital switching, in reality the two PCI-E x16 slots are pre-routed with 8 lanes each. This means that your single video card is only running in PCI-E x8 mode. We did not notice any performance degradation at our stock benchmark resolutions, but with the right application and resolution, you could see a performance drop.
In the on-board audio area, the Asus and Foxconn boards utilize the Realtek ALC850 while the Albatron board utilizes the Realtek ALC655 codec. The audio output of these codecs in the music, video, and gaming areas is sub-par while performance in games is decent. If you plan on playing on-line or value audio quality, we highly suggest a dedicated sound card at this time, but the onboard capabilities of these chipsets will satisfy the majority of office users.
In the storage area, the Asus board offers the greatest amount of storage options with additional SATA ports from the Silicon Image 3114R chipset. The Asus and Foxconn boards offer the standard ten NVIDIA USB ports while Albatron offers eight. Only Asus packages the external USB panels that allow you to take advantage of the USB connectors. You are limited to four USB ports on the Albatron and Foxconn boards unless you purchase the external panels. The Asus also offers two IEEE 1394a ports via the TI 1394a chipset. However, we believe that Firewire 800 should have been offered on the Asus board, since it is their premium offering.
In the performance area, the Albatron and Foxconn boards offer solid performance, very good stability, and decent feature sets for the price. In fact, if you are looking for basic SLI capability, then either board would be a bargain compared to the more expensive Asus board. At this time we would recommend the Foxconn board over the Albatron board due to the RAID 0 issues and a more extensive feature set for slightly more money. However, if NVIDIA SLI is not your priority, then we still recommend the Asus A8R-MVP as the value and performance leader for the AMD enthusiast.
The Asus A8N-SLI stood out from the rest of the field by consistently offering the best overall performance of the boards tested and, at times, exceeding those of the more expensive DFI and Asus flagship boards. If you require a fully featured board and can live with its overclocking capabilities, then the Asus board should be at the top of your list. In this case, a premium price does ensure premium performance.
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Gary Key - Tuesday, January 3, 2006 - link
Hi,I have been informed by Blue Gears that the significant differences we are seeing is due to the current beta driver set. They recently released a 64-bit driver set that improved performance up 18% in some applications. The general C-Media driver that was provided last fall was in worse shape than the June beta for the 32-bit operating systems so they went back to the drawing board. If you go back and read some of our recent Intel reviews you will see that Realtek has improved their HD codec performance by up to 40% in some instances over the last three driver releases. The A380 release we utilized for the ALC850/655 was around 9% better in Serious Sam II and BF2 (not shown yet) over the A379.
I would not be concerned with their next card at this point. They are very customer focused and are doing everything possible to improve the performance of the C-Media driver sets.
yacoub - Wednesday, January 4, 2006 - link
Thanks for the replies, Gary. Looking forward to seeing better numbers. I totally understand what you mean about scenes breaking up. I experience that as I'm waiting for the new BlueGears card to come out later this month so I'm running the onboard ALC-8xx series audio on the A8N-SLI Premium I have. It's pretty crappy and sometimes heavy action scenes with lots of sound sources seem to chug the computer and now I see that's typical of the onboard solutions.yacoub - Tuesday, January 3, 2006 - link
Considering the surprisingly poor results of the BlueGears and CLabs X-Fi cards in the actual gaming tests, why do you state that like it's an "obvious" conclusion when the numbers state exactly the inverse - that the onboard audio solutions, as cpu-grubbing as they are, actually provide the better framerates in most of the games tested?
Unless your results are anomalic, I'll have to start my soundcard research all over again. I was sold on the upcoming X-Plosion but now that it doesn't really gain me much if anything in the way of cpu usage improvement during gaming (half the purpose of getting a peripheral soundcard to begin with), I only end up with better audio quality (the other half of the purpose) and for that, yes, the BlueGears card should be better than the X-Fi series, but I really want to get better cpu usage as well. Hmmmm...
Gary Key - Tuesday, January 3, 2006 - link
The audio quality of those two sound cards are significantly better than the Realtek ALC850/655 codecs across the spectrum. Their performance at times is worse in absolute numbers but the difference in consistent frame rates while playing on-line and within the game was significant from a subjective viewpoint. We are finishing our benchmark suite for showing (consistently) the low/average/high frame rates with sound enabled. I did not publish the BF2/F.E.A.R./HL2 numbers yet as we needed time to verify the benchmarks were repeatable with the latest patch updates. However, the two add-in cards scored better and have more consistent frame rates than the on-board sound solutions. In a couple of scenes in the BF2 benchmark the on-solutions would stutter and the scence would break up, this never happened with the add in cards.
The lastest SSII patch and Creative drivers should improved the scores even further in that game. In Serious Sam II we were quite surprised by the results and they shadowed the same results from the last Intel article. Although I can make out the near/far audio effects being played with a set of high end headphones on the ALC850 codec, it in no way compares to the sounds being played back by the XFI and Mystique. The sound on the ALC850/655 is tinny and muffled while you can hear exacting details in the same scenes with the other two cards. It is even more obvious in F.E.A.R and BF2, almost to the point of wondering if you were listening to the same audio playback.
Also, the on-board ALC850/655 solutions only support up to 26 buffers in the drivers.
Thank you.
Gary Key - Tuesday, January 3, 2006 - link
Really need an edit function, hit the button before I finished proof reading.
Spacecomber - Tuesday, January 3, 2006 - link
Shouldn't the game benchmarks, at least, have focused on performance running two video cards in SLI? There was some mention in the Final Words section of using two video cards on these boards; so, I got the impression that this might have at least been tried. Still, it comes across as an after-thought, which seems to miss the point of a thorough testing of what is the main feature of these boards.Just a bit puzzled.
Space
Gary Key - Tuesday, January 3, 2006 - link
Good Day,We will have SLI benchmarks up once we complete the SLI roundup that consists of several more boards between the $80~$140 range. I might modify the article to include our initial results between the three boards tested. The issue is previous boards were tested with the 78.x drivers while these boards were tested with the 81.85 driver set. There is a significant performance difference in several benchmarks between the two driver sets that would have been confusing. We have not gone back and tested all of the boards in SLI with the 81.85 up to 81.98 drivers yet.
deathwalker - Tuesday, January 3, 2006 - link
Odd that the Albatron and Foxxcon come out very satisfactory in the testing and the don't make the Motherboard roundup that came out only 2 days ago. Great review though and it nice to see that you can save a couple $ on off-brand mobos and still get a decent product.Gary Key - Tuesday, January 3, 2006 - link
We still have several more value to mid-range SLI products to review and as such any final recommendations will be done at the completion of the testing cycle.
Calin - Tuesday, January 3, 2006 - link
On the second page, in the table, all the boards have slots for DDR2 memory. It should be DDR, I think