Asus-SLI Deluxe Great Mobo

[Savagestorm]

I'm creating this post to not post a problem, but to say this is one of the best motherboards I have ever worked with. I think the reason so many people are having problems with it is the fact thats its brand new technology and you have to do a few different things than usual to make sure it ups and running. After changing a few bios settings this motherboard has been a dream. My word of advice to would be SLI buyers is, if you have moderate to little computer building experience do not buy an SLI board. SLI board are for the Enthusiasts that are willing to spend some time on it. Also I suggest researching alot to curb any problems down the road. Peace.

 

[century child]

I agree wholeheartedly with every word of your post (including your sig). I've been running since December, have already changed video cards from 2x6600GT's to 1x6800GT when the latter finally became readily available and have had no problems with either configuration. It has been a nice board to work with.

 

[Regulator07]

same here, been running for 2 weeks now and have had not one problem from startup to now, prime95 runs perfectly stable and games are beautiful!

 

[ohnnyj]

Thank you for posting something such as this. Everyone gets the idea that this is a terrible motherboard, but I have had no problem whatsoever since I purchased this board in December. I am running two 6800GTs with an FX-55, 2GB or RAM (all slots filled), 4 hds, and 2 optical drives and it has been completely stable.

 

[Whitewolf]

Everything is fine for me with this board and I really love it. Absolutely stable and feature rich with all advertised features working at least for me! Some people say it's bad for overclocking which is really general and it's misleading. What this board really lacks is high memory clocks (250+) while remaining at 1T. So how can people say it sucks in overclocking when in reality the only diffrence in performance between 245 1T memory and 300 1T memory is only... 1500 more bandwidth in sandra.
So if you don't care about bragging rights for high memory clocks, this in my opinion is the best nf4-sli board. That's however on MY perspective with MY hardware. I can't really comment on people having problems with this board from day one with hardware incompatibilities, sli not working and nusty stuff like that. In some months from now we will know if all those problems people are reporting were really hardware problems with this board or they were just inexperience users doing things the wrong way.

 

[Waylay00]

Well, this will be my first build, and plan on using either the ASUS or the DFI SLI boards. I have been researching for quite a while now. What are some things to watch for on the ASUS boards that might cause problems for me as a first time builder?

 

[ohnnyj]

Originally posted by: Waylay00
Well, this will be my first build, and plan on using either the ASUS or the DFI SLI boards. I have been researching for quite a while now. What are some things to watch for on the ASUS boards that might cause problems for me as a first time builder?

Just install everything like you would on any machine w/o overclocking or changing BIOSes until you have everything up and running. Only then start to tweak things out. So just install with the shipping BIOS and leave everything at default settings. If you are doing any kind of RAID then there are other things you need to do: create a floppy with the latest nVidia RAID drivers which is part of the nForce 4 Standalone package you can grab from their site, and after you create the RAID array in the NVRAID utility hit F6 during WinXP setup and install the drivers from the diskette, from there you should be good to go.

 

[akugami]

I have seen some people able to reach 300mhz FSB on this board but one of the complaints is that you can't get past about 250mhz memory. When you're overclocking to that degree I think it's to the point where you're nitpicking. Yeah it'd be nice to reach even higher speeds but it's only to the point where you're eking out a few extra % points of performance. I think this is a fine overclocking board (perhaps not the best but not bad) and an extremely stable non overclocking board.

A couple of points.
1) You really really need the 1003 bios if you want it to be stable for overclocking. This bios seems to fix a few things like the PCI bus locks that were there but probably not fully functional. This was the first NF4 board out and it came with the 1002 bios which absolutely sucked and was the source of much of the complaints about this board. I haven't heard much complaints (NCQ aside) about this board from after people update the bios.
2) The friggin northbridge fan sucks and I need to replace mine soon. I can tell it's starting to fail because it periodically emits a huge screeching sound that is indicative of a failing fan. I've read about a lot of people having this problem as well so that's really Asus' fault. For a board that is listed retail for about 200 bones I expect higher quality on the whole board. Putting in a crap northbridge fan doesn't cut it.
3) I love all the extras that Asus packs with their mobos. If you need it at some point for your mobo, Asus most likely has packed it into the box. Say what you will about Asus but they load their boxes up. I got my mobo before I got my case and I opened it up and I couldn't fit everything back into the mobo box.

 

[Capt Caveman]

I have my A8N-SLI D coming tomorrow. Is the 250mhz memory o/c limit a bios issue? Possibly fixed w/ a future bios update?

 

[century child]

You can overclock memory past 250 mhz, just not at 1T command rate. You must raise it to 2T, then you can overclock as high as your memory will allow.

 

[Solutions]

Originally posted by: Waylay00
What are some things to watch for on the ASUS boards that might cause problems for me as a first time builder?

There is an SLI selector card on the mobo (something you will have never seen before). You need to be carefully that it is installed in the correct direction in order to have your video card/s working properly. Its not hard but its something a 1st time builder should b aware of. I suggest reading the manual...twice, before starting the build. Good luck and have fun!!!

 

[ohnnyj]

Originally posted by: Solutions

Originally posted by: Waylay00
What are some things to watch for on the ASUS boards that might cause problems for me as a first time builder?

There is an SLI selector card on the mobo (something you will have never seen before). You need to be carefully that it is installed in the correct direction in order to have your video card/s working properly. Its not hard but its something a 1st time builder should b aware of. I suggest reading the manual...twice, before starting the build. Good luck and have fun!!!

Yes you have to be very careful with the EZ selector as I once pushed it in too far and it still looked normal but the computer would not boot. You have to gently push it in and use very little pressure until it clicks into place.

 

[Capt Caveman]

By going to 2T, doesn't that hurt performance? And thus, not worth it?

 

[ohnnyj]

Originally posted by: Capt Caveman
By going to 2T, doesn't that hurt performance? And thus, not worth it?

It's a trade off between a higher overclock vs slower memory. Depending upon how high 2T lets you go it may be worth it.

 

[GuitarDaddy]

2T is definately not worth it. Personally I tested 230mhz 1T vs. 290mhz 2T and the 230mhz 1T beats it by a wide margin in all bench's including Sandra bandwidth. I saw a post by a fellow who tested much more extensively than I did, and he found that he had to get to 295mhz 2T to top 200mhz 1T

 

[Esmute]

I built my first custom computer using an A8N SLI mobo. Everything went smoothly and didn't have any probably with it what so ever.