Reviews for Asus Deluxe A8N-SLI Deluxe Desktop Motherboard - nVIDIA nForce4 SLI Chipset - Socket PGA-939

Asus Deluxe A8N-SLI Deluxe Desktop Motherboard -...

Strengths: Extremely easy to install. Excellent documentation. Bios upgrades, unlike some brands, are a breeze with the update application. Upgradable to higher-power 939 processors, now and in the future.

Weakness: None so far.

My processor is the AMD Athlon 3500+ ($267 shipped); memory is 2 Samsung DIM-DDR400-512 sticks (1 GB total) from Directron ($77.98 shipped). I got this board ($168 shipped) and the processor from BuyXG.com, which had the best all-round price and shipping deal for both, and good ratings.

I upgraded from an Asus TUSL2-C, which was about the best board when it was released, and found myself very loyal to Asus following that experience. I did a lot of research before diving in to the A8N-SLI Deluxe. This new board did not disappoint; neither would the non-deluxe version if you don't need the ultimate expandibility the Deluxe brings and you want a heavier wallet.

Excellent, easy to read instructions. Form factor is larger that the old board, but it fit fine into my Antec SOHO SX-1035B server case.

Processing a particular Quark Xpress file into print-output-quality Adobe Acrobat took 90 seconds. Previously, I could watch almost an entire MASH episode on DVD while the same file processed for 20 minutes on the old system with an 800 MHz PIII and 512 of RAM. I was frankly blown away.

No jumpers to fool with unless you want to overclock and the like. The only squinting I had to do was when plugging in the case lights, as the printing is very small, even for someone with good eyesight (but that's a problem with many boards).

At this writing, Asus has certified only 3 power supplies for this unit, all of them up there in price. However, I upgraded to a TTGI Super Flower 520 Watt from Directron (about $40) at the same time, and is humming along fine. The PS comes with a 20-pin connector, but the board has a 24-pin. No worries, as 20-pin power supplies work just fine; they can plug in only one way.
I can't comment on the SLI performance, I'm using just one 6600GT at this point.

If you want to get a board for the future, and that won't be obsolete as quickly as others out there, as SLI and 939 are, this is the board to get.

Installation was relatively easy. Windows would not start following the board and chip changeout, but running XP's repair install got it back in shape. Since I had only the original XP disk, I had to run the SP2 installer to get everything working. The only difficulty I did have was getting the built-in networking to work. Running the installer would not work right, so I uninstalled it and did a manual install by pointing to the drivers on the disk.
8 hours from beginning the process to smokin' performance. I was expecting a worse time, but it was relatively smooth.

A great board!

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Great mobo for the price

Strengths: easy to install, asus tech support is one of the best. very stable when overclocking

Weakness: not the newest SLI board from Asus

Very stable and flexable board, as for the chipset fan.. all you have to do is use the cool and quiet software and turn up the temp for the fan to hit in..it will run slower (to about 6,000 rpm) and just make sure you have good case fans. My system is running at about 40c with 5 case fans.

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Excellent Motherboard, but blighted by the Chipset...

Strengths: *Ideal for gaming (fast) *Many features (lots of connectivity options) *Stable *PCI-Express and SLI Support

Weakness: *Loud chipset fan that can fail within weeks

This is on paper a very good motherboard overall. It's fast, stable, and runs games very nicely indeed. It has lots of features (8 SATA connectors, supports up to 8 USB 2.0 ports, quality onboard sound, 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports, etc...).

I can't comment on how well the SLI feature works because I don't have two graphics cards (yet). The motherboard is quite nicely laid out and doesn't really seem to have any irritating capacitor placements or other obstructions that plague many motherboards.

I have had mine for about 5 weeks or so now. The Chipset fan has always been noisy; however after about two weeks, I started noticing a faint buzzing/rattling noise. I checked my system over and confirmed it was the Chipset fan making the noise. Over time, the intermittent fan noise has been getting worse, and the speed has been dropping.

The fan hasn't stopped *yet* but from reading many dire reports of this problem on the web, I don't hold out much hope of it lasting more than another 2-3 weeks.

It appears even ASUS are aware of the problem, because they instantly agree to send a newer design of replacement fan to anyone with the problem (although it can take weeks for anyone to receive one, and even then you run the risk of damaging the motherboard whilst replacing the heatsink/fan).

Overall, I would not recommend this motherboard to anyone simply because the chipset fan is so unreliable.

You'd be best off either buying this motherboard and immediately replacing the heatsink/fan on the chipset with a 3rd party solution, or go for the slightly more expensive A8N-SLI Premium, which dispenses with the chipset cooling solution for a heatpipe design.

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Asus Deluxe A8N-SLI Deluxe Desktop Motherboard -...

Strengths: The overall set-up is nice. The chipset is well cooled. Overall great SLI board for the AMD 64.

Weakness: None.

I am very satified with the performance of this motherboard. It has turned-out to be an excellent performer. I have an AMD Athlon 64 3700+ on it and a gig of Corsair TwinX DDR 3200-C2 and it's nothing short of amazing. ASUS keeps everything updated very well as far as drivers, BIOS, etc. I would recommend it to anyone looking for a nFoce4 chipset and SLI video setup.

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A8N-SLI Deluxe Motherboard

Strengths: Wealth of features, SLI, ASUS brand.

Weakness: None so far

I was building an SLI rig and at the time there were only 4 boards available that could run such a setup and a simple overview of specs showed that other boards were just "poor cousins" of ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe. Price at 175.00 shipped was, in my opinion, excellent given the features: socket 939, SLI, SATA 3G, dual RAID, PCI Express and legendary ASUS overclocking potential plus a bunch of ASUS proprietary features.
If you want to have future upgrade potential and feel comfortable with overclocking your rig this board is definitely for you.

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Asus Deluxe A8N-SLI Deluxe Desktop Motherboard -...

Strengths: Has a ton of features (8 sata ports, 2 Gb Ethernet ports, etc). Great overclockability.

Weakness: Had to send board back because of bad chipset fan. The replacement is good now. Also have problems recognizing a second sata hard drive.

It is a great board to have. Performance in games is very high. It is, however, a little buggy. You may want to wait about a month until some better bios updates are available.

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Do not buy this motherboard - go for the premium...

Strengths: Great features. Great accessories/cables included.

Weakness: CHIPSET FAN SUCKS!!!!

At first I was really impressed with this motherboard - the performance was astounding. Then things started to go wrong within a month...

The chipset fan died. Doing some research I discovered these motherboards are renound for this! Have now upgraded to the premium version which has no fan and so far (touch wood) Ive had no problems. Worth the extra $40!

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Asus Deluxe A8N-SLI Deluxe Desktop Motherboard -...

Strengths: Excellent options, PCI-express, onboard sound not bad. Does what its supposed to.

Weakness: Motherboard chipset fan is the weakest part of the entire board. The thing is tiny and runs at nearly 8500 rpm. I'm not sure how long it will hold out. SLI is a power hungry beast.

I bought this board because I wanted an athlon PCI-express board. This way whenever I upgrade my system I would have a choice of whether to keep either the motherboard or my PCI-E graphics card. With AGP motherboards, if I wanted to upgrade to PCI-E I'd have to get rid of both. I like having options, and this was the only pci-e athlon board out at the time I needed to buy a computer. I would look at the alternatives now if I were in the market at this moment and weigh them appropriately. I do not ever intend to use sli, and if I had the choice I would have gone for a single videocard board, but sli will make my board more valuable for resale whenever I decide to upgrade. I might just keep it since I'm not having any problems yet.

I give this a 4 though because many of the problems I've tried to help people out with on message boards.

If they do a revision of this board, I'd give Asus a zero for not making sure their product was mature enough for market. On the other hand, a lot of newbie system builders have been drawn to the a8n for its sli... and 90% of them have no idea in the world what they are doing, probably aren't grounding themselves when they are building the system, or are not taking their time when building to make sure they aren't making any obvious errors. These people have proven that you can't "wing it" when building a new system. So I take all of the harshest criticism of this board with a grain of salt because newbies mess this stuff up daily.

Final note: Do not use the nvidia IDE drivers! Many people have had problems with those.

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Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard

Strengths: Good supporting cables for auxiliary hardware-USB, Firewire,Serial ATA, etc.

Weakness: Fan failures are a major problem, as my own experience has verified.

The chipset fan started out noisy, and became worse with time, finally failing. It was so noisy in my system, (which has quiet fans -12 cm Zalman) on CPU as well as in my aluminum case, I immediately noticed that the chipset fan had stopped operating, and I shut down my system. When I originally set up this board, I considered replacing this fan, but this would have voided the warranty. I have notified Asus Customer Support, but from previous experience they are not very responsive. (It is more than a week since submission to Asus Support) My review is conditional- I am assuming Asus will resolve this. If not, I would obviously rate this board "Completely unsatisfactory."

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Motherboard

Strengths: High performance

Weakness: None

This motherboard is designed for high performance parts and when used in conjucntion with those parts, it flies. The board comes in a very neat package and with plenty of accessories for anything you would want to do with it.

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Asus Deluxe A8N-SLI Deluxe Desktop Motherboard -...

Strengths: Asus usually makes bug free boards.

Weakness: This has been the most buggy Asus board that I have bought.

I have built a lot of systems, and this has been one ofthe most difficult boards to get to work properly. The non-SLI version of this board (A8N-E) works great, but I hada heck of a time getting the A8N-SLI Deluxe to work on a clean install of XP Pro.

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Asus Deluxe A8N-SLI Deluxe Desktop Motherboard -...

Strengths: AMD 64 PCI-Express, SLI, 4 S-ATA 150 and 4 S-ATA 300, Dual Gigabit LAN

Weakness: Extremely minor-1. I have to remove my GeForce 6800 ultra to add/remove RAM 2. Chipset cooler has like a 3cm fan that wizzes at ~8,000 RPM...what were they thinking?

This motherboard has it all and i am extremely pleased with it. There are 2 sets of 4 SATA ports; one is the Nvidia and the other is Silicon Image allowing some major storage capabilities. The Nvidia set even claims to be able to burst up to 300 Gb/s for next-generation SATA support. Even with the 2 minor flaws that i have pointed out this board is worth every cent! I have had none of the problems that i have read in other reviews(chipset fan failure, raid failure, etc).

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Asus Deluxe A8N-SLI Deluxe Desktop Motherboard -...

Strengths: Dual PCI-X

Weakness: Loud Chipset Fan, Poor Audio Quality, Poor Customer Service

I usally always buy Asus Motherboards and have never had as much trouble as I have had with this one. After having this board for 3 days the chipset fan was running as noisy as ever, and on the 4th day stopped all together. Calling into Asus was a nightmare as well. The fan was on Backorder for weeks. All I would get is sorry and there is nothing we can do. I have also had nothing but problems with the sound quality as well. I will probably just buy a Sound Blaster Audigy card to resolve the issue.

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Asus Deluxe A8N-SLI Deluxe Desktop Motherboard -...

It's a pretty nice board. So far I've only had three problems with the board.

1. Silicon RAID has failed, It won't detect any drives attached to the board on the Sil controller. Glad there is a "back-up" controller on-board, with the nvidia controller. I had RAID 5 up and working for about 3 days.

2. Printer port does not work at all. Glad my printer can also connect via usb. Printer port worked fine for about 7 days.

3. And now the chipset fan. It lasted 14 days.

Other than those 3 problems, I'd say the mobo is a real bargain at $250. Maybe in a couple of months I'll find a better SLI mobo.

A8N-SLI | 3X Raptors (RAID 5) | AMD 4000+ | 2X Cheiftec 6600GT (SLi) | 1024 MB OCZ EL PLAT DDR PC3200 | OCZ MODSTREAM 420 Watts | Sony DRU-710A DL DVD/CD RW | ZALMAN CNPS7000B-Cu CPU Cooler | Kingwin KT-424 Aluminum Case

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Asus Deluxe A8N-SLI Deluxe Desktop Motherboard -...

Strengths: Fast, easy to setup, athlon 64 and SLI supported

Very good motherboard, very easy to set up. Athlon 64 + SLI capability is a nice combination. Note that a 24-pin power supply is recommended, although a 20-pin connector will work. I'm using a 20-pin right now but only because I'm running just one 6600GT.

Great overall motherboard with a lot of good features!

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Asus Deluxe A8N-SLI Deluxe Desktop Motherboard -...

Strengths: all the bells and whistles.... sli. raid

Weakness: chipset fan is junk... both the onboard raid controllers are not xp-64 bit compliant. on a 64-bit board that just doesn't make any sense???

all in all i would buy a different board if i had the chance. oh yea if you want to replace the chipset fan you have to remove the entire board. bad engineering call on asus' part. lets make it take forever and require a ton of effort to replace a 50 cent part. way to go asus... junk

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Asus Deluxe A8N-SLI Deluxe Desktop Motherboard -...

Strengths: Has all the latest " bells and whistles " and allows anyone with the interest and $$ to create a super PC around it.

Weakness: None noted after 30 days.

My son coached me along about what to use in my new PC. This Asus board was the best choice I made besides using an AMD processor. It offers mucho expandability and is fairly priced. After building my system with my son's expert supervision it's the best rated board out there. I recommend this board to all levels of PC users and don't think you'll regret it.

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Asus Deluxe A8N-SLI Deluxe Desktop Motherboard -...

Strengths: nForce4 supports the latest PC hardware, such as NCQ hardrives. Supports dual PCI-e video cards. Tons of features.

Weakness: Noisy chipset fan [runs at 8000-8400 RPM!].

Fast motherboard with tons of features and nForce4 supports the latest PC hardware. Everything runs stable and fast on my Athlon 64 4000+ system. As for the noisy chipset fan, I've noticed that some users online have managed to replace it with a Zalman heatsink to get rid of the noise. I'm going to do that too!

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Asus Deluxe A8N-SLI Deluxe Desktop Motherboard -...

Strengths: Dual gigabit nics. 8 sata ports. Very nice onboard audio. SLI capable. one of the first implementations of pci express on a AMD processor.

Weakness: cost

i can't say enough about this board. it has features never seen before in a motherboard. The audio on board is high quality. Comes with a ton of expansion cards to use in the pci slots. procesor support range is very large.

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Asus Deluxe A8N-SLI Deluxe Desktop Motherboard -...

Strengths: Very fast, tons of features, SLI-capability.

Weakness: Chipset fan, onboard sound.

This is a very fast motherboard with tons of features on top of great performance. The nVidia system tweaking and monitoring tools are better than those of any Intel system. The chipset fan runs a little fast and loud at 8000 rpm, but does supply sufficient cooling to the chipset. My motherboard also had a problem with the onboard sound having poor audio quality, but I may have configured something incorrectly. If you can get around it's few downfalls, the A8N0SLI is a wonderful motherboard.

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Asus Deluxe A8N-SLI Deluxe Desktop Motherboard -...

Strengths: Nice design, Optical and rca digital audio output, Windows based overclocking - No need to reboot or go to bios. Dual channel memmory shows support up to DDR 600 (BIOS Max)

Weakness: None so far, but read the comments

One of the best board I met to go with FX-55 proccessor.
Installed everythin you can think of and very little notice in speed decrease. I had trouble however overclocking my sistem with ASUS's preset overclocking options. Cause my system to crash with 10% overclock. I haven't played with it much yet so I mite have to play with voltage and everything.

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Asus Deluxe A8N-SLI Deluxe Desktop Motherboard -...

Strengths: Lots of features, SLI, fast, dual-channel, great manual, Socket 939

Weakness: Chipset fan is no good.

A great board by Asus. It has tons of features and was easy to setup. It recogrnized all system components, including an SATA hard drive, right off the bat. SLI is certainly a good feature for gamers, and dual-channel memory is good for everyone. I highly recommend this mobo.

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Asus Deluxe A8N-SLI Deluxe Desktop Motherboard -...

Strengths: Fast, easy to set up, plenty of features

Weakness: None so far

Got the motherboard 7 days ago and coupled with an FX 55, 2 gig of OCZ memory (platinum rev 2), 2 eVGA 6800 ultra and a pair of WD raptor 10000 rpm (in RAID 0). Everything encased in a Koolance 650U case
The computer runs faster then light. No problem so far.
The installation went quite smoothe and easy.
Great motherboard with plenty of features

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Asus Deluxe A8N-SLI Deluxe Desktop Motherboard -...

Strengths: All the options. Good information on setup. Great Features.

Weakness: None so far.

I was looking around for a while for the perfect mobo and I think I found it! This will last me a long time with the ability to upgrade due to the mobo's excellent features. Definately worth every penny!

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Asus Deluxe A8N-SLI Deluxe Desktop Motherboard -...

Strengths: It is technologically designed for all the upcoming computer graphics, memory, and hard drive upgrades.

This is the coolest motherboard on the market at a fairly reasonable price. It has all the little extras most motherboards would dream to have. Look at the specs to understand the badness of this board.

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Asus Deluxe A8N-SLI Deluxe Desktop Motherboard -...

Strengths: many features

Weakness: none

very easy to set up and very nice color coded ports with matching color coded cable. Tons of features too much for me to use. Very easy to set up dual sli video cards. Need a high powered power supply. SATA power cables provided and also Sli video card power cables.

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Asus Deluxe A8N-SLI Deluxe Desktop Motherboard -...

Strengths: 2 SATA Raid, lots of USB 2.0, 2 Ethernet ports, Easy to update BIOS, easy to use overclock features.

Weakness: Need to remove video card to add/remove RAM 2.

Very reliable, easy to install, everything fits well on it. I'm really impressed with the features, not sure I'm gonna use all of them now but is good for future upgrades.
Another good point is the 4 or 5 ways you have to update the BIOS. Just follow the instructions and update BIOS is not scary anymore.
The only thing is that my video card (MSI Geforce 6600 GT PCI-e) blocks one clip to release the memory on the first slot. Not a big problem since I don't have to remove the memory so often, but install memories first then the video card.

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Asus Deluxe A8N-SLI Deluxe Desktop Motherboard -...

Strengths: Fast, Easy to set up, Comprehensive and feature-filled BIOS, Plenty of BIOS utilities, Lots of cables (eliminating the need to buy), SLi is very powerful, Incredible number of SATA and USB ports

Weakness: Expensive for a mainboard, Placing PCI slot between PCI Express slots limits their use, Requires three expansion slots to use SLi

The ASUS A8N-SLi Deluxe mainboard is an excellent choice for all sorts of computer builders. The color-coded ports and well-written documentation allow beginners to correctly set up the board, its myriad of ports give power users and servers the expansion room they need, and gamers will appreciate the powerful SLi dual-graphics capabilities, 4GB RAM capacity, and easy BIOS overclocking. Although it may be pricey, you definately get what you pay for, along with much more!

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Asus Deluxe A8N-SLI Deluxe Desktop Motherboard -...

Strengths: the best one for dual pci-x video

Weakness: needs two graphics card

you can go above and beyond with this motherboard. If you want SLI which of course you do, otherwise why would you be looking at this motherboard, then you should get it! is it expensive? sure, but it is worth it if you have a big monitor, say 19+ inches, and you want your games to look superb. big monitor needs high resolution, which SLI will provide. warning: I suspect only 5% of all users out there should spend the money for this. don't forget you need to buy two video cards, that will cost a lot.

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nothing works..........!!!!!!!!!!!!

Strengths: lots of ilusion goes down

Weakness: every thing in this mb fail

nothing works fine...!!!!!!!!
expensive mb, graph cards, expensive psu
bad bios, bad nvidia chipser
the most expensive mb I've ever had
the worst one
if tthey don't arrange bios problems...
asus---->never more...!!!!!!!!!!

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Fantastic MOBO

Strengths: Expandability!!! Came with all cables and add-in cards as well as the SLI connector. Board well marked. Excellent documentation and software.

Weakness: No 10 pin Intel audio connector. A modem would really be nice too (it doesn't hurt to have dialup for backup for your cable)! No onboard video.

This is the first ASUS board that I have ever used and it may be the last! I really mean it. This board has all the bells and whistles that you could need for the next 5 years (well, I may be eggagerating a bit). It really is a great board, it was a little tight going into the case, but other than that, no problems. I like the 2 LAN ports, the multiple USB ports. It handles the AMD64FX chip and SLI video. I couldn't ask for more in a MOBO. I'm sure that I could have gotten by with the cheaper version of the same board after seeing this one. This is definately a good MOBO.

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A8N-SLI Deluxe Motherboard

Strengths: Dual PCI - Loaded with extras - raid, usb, sata ports

Weakness: Chipset fan!

Nice features...plenty of bells and whistles. But still not sure if ASUS put out the best board this time. I feel they should have kept it in testing a little longer. I'm not totally comfortable in completing the switch. I also have the ASUS A7N8x Deluxe as my primary pc till I iron out the few bugs in this one. Although it does smoke my other pc away! Stability??? We shall see.

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Not a happy camper!

Strengths: When the southbridge fan is working it runs fine.

Weakness: Southbridge fan suxors!

The first southbridge fan quit and they sent me a new "improved" fan. I had to take my mobo out, not fun after getting everything setup in my case the way I wanted it. I thought, great problem solved. A few months later the same thing happened. I guess I will have to get another mobo. I will never buy an Asus again.

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Brilliant mid-low end motherboard

Strengths: Overclocking is a breeze, layout is perfect for my mid-tower, installation went without a hitch

Weakness: none. If the chipset fan bugs you, enable Cool N Quiet.

Overclocked my AMD X2 3800+ to 2.4 GHz on 1.36 VCore. stable and remains cool and quiet (or relatively so). Great for the beginner overclocker, NOT recommended for us advanced folks who want some more BIOS options and more bells & whistles. Handles my ATI X1800XT (Overclocked through Catalyst to 690/1600), and remains stable. Did I get lucky? Or is this just a good board with a bad chipset fan. Either way, it's a great budget board.

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Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe

Testseek.com has collected 14 expert reviews for Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe and the average expert rating is 82 of 100. The average score reflects the expert community’s view on this product. Click below and use Testseek.com to see all ratings, product awards and conclusions.

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Finally Available: Nine Socket 939 Athlon64 Motherboards!

The A8N-SLI Deluxe is the proud and rightful flagship of the Asus line of Athlon 64 boards. It goes without saying that it features NVIDIA's nForce4-SLI chipset; thus, it offers two x16 PCIe slots, spaced far enough apart to accommodate even graphics cards with monstrous cooling solutions.

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