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ASUS A7N8X nForce2

The ASUS A7N8X is one of the first incarnations of the nVidia nForce2 chipset-based motherboards to hit retail shelves. We have seen good and bad previews of the technology. How will it look when it gets to your box?

Introduction

ASUS is one of Taiwan's larger motherboard manufacturers, with offices worldwide. Founded in 1989, they've grown to nearly 20,000 employees, with 5 manufacturing facilities capable of producing two million motherboards and 150,000 notebooks a month. They of course also build some of America's favorite overclocking mainboards.

The A7N8X is ASUS's entry into the nForce2 chipset market. If you've been keeping up with the nForce2 material on the Net, you know that it supports a Dual Channel DDR400 memory bus, 8x AGP, 6-channel Dolby Sound (SoundStorm), and the only onboard 5.1 Dolby Digital encoder available in a chipset. The MCP-T also provides 10/100 NIC functionality, six USB 2.0 ports, IEEE-1394 (Firewire), and an ATA133 controller. Our original look at the technology from July can be found here. As many of you know, this technology is late, as the dates that were committed to by NVIDIA for retail delivery weren't kept. Of course, the technology is here now, and we want to see what is being done with it. ASUS has added an integrated 3Com 10/100 NIC, support for vocal POST error reporting, intelligent fan speed adjustment, and an automatic shutdown system for protection against thermal CPU damage, making this a fairly feature-packed board.

A quick rundown on the specs:

A not-so-quick rundown on the specs for you wanting a bit more information:

The Extras

ASUS packed this box with accessories, giving us two manuals, a driver disc, two serial ATA cables, an 80-conductor ATA133 cable, a 40-conductor ATA cable, a floppy cable, an ATX DMI shield, a quick reference card, and a reference sticker for the inside of your case. Also included are three brackets: a 9 pin serial bracket, a 2 port USB and joystick bracket, and a Firewire bracket.

Board Layout

The first thing you'll notice when the board is pulled out of the box is the huge amount of free acreage on the board. There's plenty of space around just about everything, and as such, you're not likely to see anyone's fingers in this review.

 

Introducing the stars of the show. Seeing as NVIDIA has to have their own name for things, playing "Northbridge", we have the nForce2 SPP chip, and as "Southbridge", we have the nForce2 MCP-T chip. As you can see clearly in both photos, there's more than enough room for aftermarket cooling solutions around the chipset placements, should they be wanted.

 

When not exposed for the world to see, the nForce2 SPP is covered with a standard aluminum heatsink, without a fan. Originally, I suspected this might cause some problems with running at higher speeds, but as it turned out, the heatsink never approached anything above "lukewarm to the touch" during benchmarking. In the second photograph, you can see that as opposed to most of the boards currently on the market, there's no problem with swapping out or installing RAM while an AGP card is installed.

 

Without anything populating the DIMM slots, the color-coding is more obvious. ASUS recommends in the manual that the blue slots be populated first. This is necessary to take advantage of the dual-DDR controllers in the nForce2 chipset. The ATX power header and FDD and IDE headers are easily accessible at the edge of the board, and present no complications in their use. The various front panel headers are also at the front edge of the board, with the SATA connectors placed in tandem at the right edge. Installing this board shouldn't take very long, as all the connections are easily accessed.

 

Around the ZIF socket are found the four mounting holes needed for some aftermarket cooling options and not found on some of the Athlon-supporting boards of late. There is a good amount of clearance between the socket and the capacitors to the right, and you can tell that two of the capacitors have been shifted a bit to allow a little more clearance around the 3 clip holders on the right edge of the socket. It is great to see a bit of thought going into this as it is obvious that the Asus engineers are becoming more sensitive to the needs of the enthusiast. In the photo on the right, the PCI slots are unobstructed and the two headers for the Firewire bracket are convieniently placed right in the middle of the backplane, making placement of the bracket dependent only on what slots are open. Also, the tiny chip in the lower right corner of the board directly above the mounting screw point is the Speech Controller used to help dignose POST errors, if speakers are plugged in.

 

In the photo on the left, the backplane is shown to be well laid out, and includes both NIC ports, 4 USB ports, the legacy PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors, a parallel port, a serial port, and the audio connectors. The yellow connector beside the rightmost USB/NIC ports is the SPDIF out for connecting the board to a 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround Sound decoder, like what you'd find in a home theater system. In the photo on the right, I've pulled the heatsink off the Northbridge and revealed the TIM that ASUS used to cool the chip. The heatsink is held on with two small spring clips clicked into the motherboard. It can be removed fairly easily with a pair of needlenose pliers, some wiggling, and a little patience. The TIM can be scraped off carefully with a hard straight edge and replaced with the thermal compound of your choice, although the TIM seemed to perform quite well in the benchmarking of this board.