The Asus A8n-SLI Motherboard is an enthusiast level motherboard designed with PC gaming in mind. Supporting a wide range of processors and NVIDIA graphics cards, this motherboard is definitely a processing powerhouse. Coming in at just over $200 as of 2009, and supporting the empirically less-expensive AMD processors, this motherboard allows for excellent performance, even for those on a budget.
History
The Asus A8n-SLI Motherboard was released in late 2004. The Asus A8n-SLI Motherboard was one of the first motherboards available that was capable of using NVIDIA's Scalable Link Interface, otherwise known as SLI. The utilization of SLI was made possible through the use of the recently released NVIDIA nForce 4 northbridge chipset. Its intended market at time of release was that of the enthusiast PC gamer.
CPU Subsystem
The Asus A8n-SLI Motherboard utilizes socket 939 to allow support for AMD processors only. Processor supported by the Asus A8n-SLI include those from the AMD Athlon 64FX and Athlon 64 processor families. This motherboard supports 64-bit computing naturally, and allows for 32 and 64-bit computing operations to be performed simultaneously. The front side bus connecting this processor to the rest of the system operates at either 2000 or 1600 million transfers per second.
Memory Subsystem
The memory capacity of the Asus A8n-SLI allows for up to four 184 pin memory modules to be installed at one time. The maximum supported amount of memory by the motherboard is 4GB. Memory speeds are 400, 300, and 266 MHz in either ECC or non-ECC unbuffered RAM to be installed for increased compatibility. Finally, the memory architecture of the Asus A8n-SLI Motherboard supports DDR two dual channel memory for near double thorough put of data processing power.
Graphics and SLI Subsystem
The graphics subsystem of the Asus A8n-SLI Motherboard allows for the use of SLI to combine two graphics cards for video processing performance. The motherboard comes with two PCI-e 16X graphics interface ports. When a single VGA card is installed that poor runs at 16X interface speed, the two graphics cards are engaged in SLI mode, and the PCI-e slots will drop down to 8X mode. It is worth noting that SLI only supports NVIDIA graphics cards.
Connectivity
The Asus A8n-SLI Motherboard comes with eight SATA and two EIDE ports for disc drive connectivity. The motherboard supports RAID 0, 1, 0+1, and 5. The onboard sound is based on a Realtek chipset supporting eight channels of audio. Other connectivity features include two FireWire ports, 10 USB 2.0 ports, and one COM port for either keyboard or mouse connectivity.
Tags: Asus A8n-SLI, A8n-SLI Motherboard, Asus A8n-SLI Motherboard, graphics cards, 64-bit computing