We certainly do evaluate and showcase our fair share of ASUS products here at HotHardware, and it's no great mystery because Asus is also typically one of the first out of the block with a new chipset technology. The company's new A8N32 SLI Deluxe motherboard is no exception. NVIDIA's new nForce 4 SLI X16 chipset has been out the door at NVIDIA for months now, but retail boards have yet to appear on the scene. We've heard ABIT and others may have boards on the horizon, based on this new high-end NVIDIA chipset, but the A8N32 SLI Deluxe was the first to hit our test bench, and it looks like it will be the first to hit retail sometime this week. NVIDIA has also launched the Intel version of the nForce 4 SLI X16, and we're also working with that board, dubbed the P5N32-SLI Deluxe, right now.
The new NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI X16 chipset takes the same basic feature set of the hugely successful nForce 4 SLI and expands upon its PCI Express lane configuration, offering two full X16 graphics slots for dual graphics SLI configurations. This adds another 16 lanes to the chipset, as well as 16 additional 2.5G PCI Express SerDes (serializer/de-serializer) interfaces, which in turn adds to chip real-estate and pin count. As a result, in this incarnation, the nForce 4 SLI X16 has become a discrete two-chip solution for north and southbridge functionality. We'll give you more on the chipset later; for now let's run down what the ASUS A8N32 SLI Deluxe has to offer.
___________
Review:
HotHardware
Oct 19, 2005, 07:18 AM
