Hey, who brought in the Lawyer, Nuff said .
Ok, I built two A8N SLI Deluxe machines this weekend and I am very impressed with these boards. They are stable and feature rich and i didnt run across too many problems. I decided to post about the experience since I did run across a few things mentioned in this thread over the last few months but was able to elimate any issues easily. Specs for each machine are listed below and they are identical in every way.
The first build was started with 2 gforce 6600gts in place (duaghter card set to 1 video card on mobo) and the motherboard bios at 1002 and pretty much the way it came out of the box whith the exception of Cool N Quiet disabled. I also set DDR 400 instead of Auto for ram timing from reading that in this forum. 2 Seagate Sata 2 drives, a Plextor 16xaf burner and an Audigy ZS2 were the only other hardware installed and i purposley left off all usb devices aside from keyboard and mouse. XP with SP2 loaded properly and I had a number of devices with yellow warnings in device manager that needed drivers loaded. I began the installation of drivers from the Asus cd and pretty much followed the order of drivers but skipped over any raid settings. I did attemp to begin install the SIL driver but when i saw the question about raid 5 or 10 I sensed something was up and bailed out of that install. I remebered there was a SIL Windows update driver for my older Gigabyte boards and decided to go that rout given the issue with single drives on that controller posted in these boards Then I loaded Utilites from Asus but none of the other crap on the cd.
1st error was the, "You must disable CoolnQuiet in order to run AI Booster. When i installed the Cool N Quiet Software it enabled Cool N Quiet in the Bios so i Turned that off and error disappeared. I also removed the run line command in the registry for AI booster so it wouldnt start on startup and rebooted.
At this point the SIL driver, Nvidia Drivers and Audigy drivers are the only thing left needing drivers. I decided at this point i was going to load the video but was concerned about two cards being in and decided to remove one of the 6600 gt's and reboot. Loaded Nvidia drivers, rebooted, shut machine down, turned daughter card to 2 video card selection and added second card. On Boot it informed me i needed to enable SLI which i did and rebooted and two video cards loaded properly. Loaded Audigy Card drivers from stock CD with no issues and all apps and then updated at creative both drivers and apps (I had no issues with this on 1st machine but see second machine build for issues with this). At this point I ran Windows Update and downloaded a bunch a stuff including the SIL and Marvel Drivers offered and rebooted numerouse times and all was up and running fine. I shut the machine down and added a Maxtor Ultra 16 Sata 250 16Meg Cache drive to the Sill controller just to see if it would see a single drive and it did. I like the nvidia controller with its increased throughput so i rebooted one more time and moved the maxtor over to that controller with the Seagates and there are no issues. Machine Flys and runs great.
The second build started off the same way but i made a critical mistake. I forgot to have the video daughter card changed to 1 video card. All went fine until I got to the Audigy portion and when i installed Audigy drivers and rebooted I got, NO OS DISK FOUND on boot. After a few hours of trouble shooting sound card, hard drives etc.. I discovered I had done the build with two cards in but the daughter card set to dual instaead of 1 video card and this was definatley creating my issue. It wasnt enough to just turn off SLI take a card out and turn the daughter card arround to fix the issue. When i got the NO OS DISK FOUND Please insert system disk, through playing arround i discovered i could boot no problem as long as i had a cd in the drive ( no not to the cd, to the drive partition on disk 1) but if i didnt have a cd in cdrom drive i got the OS error. At this point i determined i was going to reset the bios per the Asus manual (remove battery, change jumper for 5 seconds and then replace) Upon next boot I went into the bios and all looked pretty normal but I changed the things i wanted to change and Walla, BOOT message disappeard, XP sees 1 video card and then i turned off added the second and switched the daughter board back to dual vcard, enabled sli and rebooted and the machine is running flawlessly now.
In a nut shell, AI Booster and Cool N Quiet cant run together per Asus in the manual so whoever postes a while back about this error its not an error, its normal.
Make sure ya build with one video card and the daughter card pointing to 1 video card
Use Microsoft Update Driver for Sil if ya want single drives on Sil without Raid
I am replacing the 6600GT's with Ultras as my cards will finaly be in today so i will edit and post any information I get about uninstalling 2 cards, turning off sli and putting two different ones back in and re-enabling sli.
All in all I think the technology is way over the top awesome and I had a great time building these machines. I updated the Bios to 1003-006 beta to solve a crashing Problem in the EQ2 client but other than that they have been rock solid.
(Per machine)
Lian-Li Warrior (Xoxide) Black Aluminum case, blue led lighting (6 fans= 120mm blow hole exhaust top, 2 front 80mm intake, 2 side 80mm intake, 1 rear 80mm exhaust, dual blue cold cathode lights, 2 front usb 2 ports)
Asus A8n SLI Deluxe motherboard
Audigy 2 ZS THX soundcard
2 gig OCZ Platnum Rev 2 low latency 2-2-2-5 DDR 400 ram
Athlon 64 bit Clawhammer processor (FX 55) @2600
2 Geforce 6600GT PCI Express cards (per machine in sli mode)(soon to be 6800 Ultras)
2 Seagate Sata 2 160 gig hard drives
1 Maxtor Sata 2 250 gig hard drive 16mb Cache
Plextor 16x dvd burner with 4x double layer recording
Samsung 16x DVD ROM ripper
Pc Power and Cooling 510 Turbo deluxe SLI power supply
Gigabyte Rocket 3d Pro CPU fan heat sink
Arctic Silver 5
CPU idle 36C
load 46 C (6 Hours of grinding in EQ2)
Unbelievably SMOKIN and thats without any OC