Asus A7N8X Review

Intro

A while back (about 2 weeks) I had been interested in purchasing an Epox 8K9A2+ which was having reports of people breaking 235mhz fsb stock and 260+ mhz fsb w/ some modifications.  I waited, and waited, and waited.  Newegg kept pushing back the release date!  So when I was at the point of flipping out I saw "Asus A7N8X nforce2 IN STOCK!" and I jumped at the opportunity.  I had it shipped PRONTO over to me and was anxious to fire it up.  I will say this right off the bat.  This board is great!  Asus has really done a knock-out job on this board.  Many of their previous boards have not been that great for overclocking and I was semi-hesitant but I did know that the option for 211mhz fsb was there, so maybe... just maybe I could hit that :)  Read on to find out more!

Before we get into the pictures, again I have added some extra cooling to this motherboard.  I have included an 80mm fan over the northbridge and the cpu mosfets.  I have also included heatsinks on the mosfets.  In these pictures you can also see the variable resistors (one on the southbridge and one on top of the lan plug).  The voltage modifications will be explained on the last page. :)

Features

This board is jam packed with features.  It includes serial raid, amazing 5.1 sound, onboard LAN, USB 2.0, and of course dual channel DDR!!  That's why I got this board!  The features don't end there though.  You also get a pretty good amount of software, including a windows bios updater.  I haven't tried it yet but I will as a new bios (1001E) was just released.  When I test that I will add some notes on the last page of this review if I find anything relevent.  And speaking of the bios, this board has a pretty good set of bios features.  You can set the vcore up to 1.85v and the DDR up to 2.8v (which I know isn't much, but I fixed that problem).  You can also set the fsb from 100-200mhz and then 204, 207, and 211mhz.  Hopefully with the creation of a new version of setFSB we will be able to get more FSB options available.  There are also plenty of ram timing options if that's your bag.

Pictures

Overview shot	A shot of the heatsinks	Angle shot	Super duper aircooling? Sure!	A diff. angle

Next Page - BIOS / Overclocking / Benchmarks