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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DAPUNISHER - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
Off to peruse your Intel articles.DAPUNISHER - Wednesday, January 4, 2006 - link
I enjoyed your review, your 1st for AT? but for a moment, I though I was reading a retro review from AT. I liked it better when AT eschewed 3D synthetics, and chose to bench the latest, greatest titles. Even D3 and FarCry seem long in the tooth IMHO. Many do still play FarCry, but most use all the new tweaks.Perhaps there is logic to the methodolgy that I'm missing? TIA for any illuminating reply, and I look forward to your future reviews here :-)
Gary Key - Wednesday, January 4, 2006 - link
Hi,Actually, I have been covering the Intel reviews for the past few months. We are in the process of a transition over to the newer benchmarks. The last Intel article with those benchmarks can be found here-
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2631&am...">http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2631&am...
The ability to go back and test all of the boards shown with the new benchmarks and driver sets was not possible. However, the next roundup should include newer benchmarks along with results from these three boards. Also, while FarCry and SC3 are "getting" long in the tooth they are both based on engines that can still stress a system by increasing the settings. They both offer a fairly good mix of cpu and gpu limited testing. The difference between D3 and Q4 is minimal except for SMP support now. We are also looking at providing repeatable and meaningful benchmarks for the RTS/SIM crowd without resorting to FRAPs. We plan on increasing the audio, power consumption, and disk RAID subject matter within the review process. You should see this process evolve over the next couple of months.
da2ce7 - Wednesday, January 4, 2006 - link
I got the original ASUS A8N-SLI Premium with a AMD X2 3800+ and found the stability very less than satisfactory with any bios less than 1007. However over clocking has been mediocre, at the standard multiplier (10X) I can raise the FSB to 254, from 200, providing a reasonable over clock, anything higher than this I seem to be hitting the wall. The voltage options are a real disappointment only letting me raze them to 1.45v. However I get no difference when overlooking when my voltage is 1.4 to 1.45, (except for my core temp), with the old bios I could raze the v-core to 1.5 and run the FSB at 260 very happily (the system did sometimes crash every 32 hours or so), I did not test it any further then before upgrading to 1007.When upgrading from the bios 1005 to 1007 I found that it would not post after the update, after much delay and many tests and try's I found that my very low timings T1-2-2-2-5-2 for the ram stopped it from booting. I gained control of it from putting in a stick of very old pc2100 ram and re-set the bios timings to automatic.
With your review I found it disappointing that you did not test the Silicone Ice raid controller, I have been wondering witch one I should run my hard drive on.
Gary Key - Wednesday, January 4, 2006 - link
We will be including RAID results in future articles. There have been some issues with repeatable results utilizing a variety of benchmarks and of course drive configurations.
I would run the native nF4 RAID setup over the SI3114 in this case (assuming RAID0). However, if it were the SI3132 chipset on the board I would probably call it a toss up at this time.
LX - Tuesday, January 3, 2006 - link
Why would you bother to include a bunch of performance charts where the difference between the leading and the trailing boards is less than 5%?Don't you have enough important info to put in your articles instead of fillers?
Gary Key - Wednesday, January 4, 2006 - link
Thank you for the comments. I think the purpose of the article was to show that performance between a $100 board and that of boards costing up to $250 (A8N32) is basically the same at stock speeds. The differences in pricing will usually (not all of the time) buy additional features and greater performance via stable overclocking.
What would you like to see in our articles that we are not providing?
JustAnAverageGuy - Tuesday, January 3, 2006 - link
It may be worth noting that in the 1011.001 BIOS, the maximum vcore drops to 1.500V with dual core processors. :)Gary Key - Wednesday, January 4, 2006 - link
We did not have an opportunity to finalize testing with the dual cores for the articles but this issue has been brought to Asus's attention. Thanks!yacoub - Tuesday, January 3, 2006 - link
Wtf is up with the BlueGears card?? Is that simply a driver issue or not? It's such an excellent audio solution it's beyond shocking to see it perform even WORSE than onboard sound solutions when it comes to cpu usage. wtf indeed! Generally simply being a peripheral PCI device sound solution means it should be well BELOW the usage of onboard sound. Now I'm worried about purchasing their new card coming out this month (X-Plosion - onboard DTS in addition to onboard DDL like the X-Mystique has).Please update us when you receive the new drivers and figure out why the cpu usage of this card during gaming is so atrocious. Thanks.