ASUS - ASUS A7N8X Top Pick @ [H]ardOCP

The ASUS A7N8X receives ‘Top Pick’ award in Trey Shewmake’s review @ [H]ardOCP. Don’t miss the benchmark pics in the Subsystem Testing section.

The A7N8X is ASUS’s entry into the nForce2 chipset market. If you’ve been keeping up with the nForce2 material on the Net, you know that it supports a Dual Channel DDR400 memory bus, 8x AGP, 6-channel Dolby Sound (SoundStorm), and the only onboard 5.1 Dolby Digital encoder available in a chipset. The MCP-T also provides 10/100 NIC functionality, six USB 2.0 ports, IEEE-1394 (Firewire), and an ATA133 controller. Our original look at the technology from July can be found here. As many of you know, this technology is late, as the dates that were committed to by NVIDIA for retail delivery were kept. Of course, the technology is here now, and we want to see what is being done with it. ASUS has added an integrated 3Com 10/100 NIC, support for vocal POST error reporting, intelligent fan speed adjustment, and an automatic shutdown system for protection against thermal CPU damage, making this a fairly feature-packed board.This is not the first nForce2 board we have had our hands on over the last few months, but it without a doubt the smoothest one we have seen yet. The Asus A7N8X paired with our 2400+ at a tweaked out bus is simply blindingly fast, responding immediately to user commands. Neither chipset seems very warm to the touch after hours were spent at higher than spec speeds. I never had the feeling that I was living on the edge at 200/200. In fact the board felt as though it was meant to do it. All the extras such as USB2.0 and Firewire ports all functioned properly even at overclocked speeds as should be expected on this board.

One of the small drawbacks of the board that may not be so obvious, or simply may not be a drawback at all is the lack of a GigE NIC. We would have expected the nForce2 to support Gigabit Ethernet or at least we thought Asus would have made it an add on as they are doing with so many other boards. Still, as far as gripes go, this is not a very big one at all.

The A7N8X performed remarkably well when compared to the KT400 based systems as well as the Pentium 4 845PE Max2 at 2.53GHz. Never once did the Asus A7N8X give me even the slightest bit of trouble the entire time I worked with it, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for an upgrade. Performance-wise, it’s an outstanding bang for the buck at an online price of around US$150.00.

The nForce2 chipsets have definately made their mark on the motherboard market with this debut, and I look eagerly for the next manufacturer who matches ASUS in their reliability and performance with this chipset. Many kudos to ASUS for a job well done, and a board well made. It certainly deserves to be considered a [H]ard|OCP Top Pick.