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- Date:
- Monday , December 09, 2002
- Author:
- Trey Shewmake
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
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?
BIOS Lowdown
ASUS chose a Phoenix BIOS to implement on this board. Seen below is the usual BIOS GUI that Asus has used for a while now. We personally find the layout used by most of the other board builders to be a bit more user friendly. Overall, though, the BIOS is easy to navigate once you get used to it. Of course if you have been using Asus boards for a long time, you will be right at home with this BIOS.
Here's the first page of the BIOS with the standard settings for date/time and drive designations.
The Advanced BIOS Features menu has the boot device selections, the option to turn off the CPU caches, and most interestingly, the ability to turn on or off the mildly disturbing POST voice. The speech POST reporter is very handy for diagnosing boot time errors, as it tells you exactly what the cause of the error is, instead of some obscure number/letter combination or a flashing LED. When deliberately triggered by removing the system RAM, it spoke in a clear female voice, and said, "System memory missing", with good enunciation and at a normal room volume. When initially triggered by unintentionally setting the DIMM frequency too high, it said "Memory speed too high" and caused the reviewer to jump out of his chair. As always, your mileage may vary. We have found these voice implementations to be touch and go at best in boards we have seen for the past year now. It seems as though Asus has a good handle on making it work finally.
The Advanced Chipset Features menu has the settings for the CPU and FSB tweaks, as well as voltage ranges. The CPU External FSB ranges from 100 MHz to 211 MHz, in 1 MHz increments from 100-200, and then 204, 207, and 211. The multiplier ranges from 9x to 17x, giving a theoretical max CPU speed of 17x211 = 3,587MHz.
Memory frequency can be adjusted by percentage, requiring the use of a calculator for those of us with poor math skills, but paying off in the end by allowing for greater flexibility and better accuracy of the indicated memory bus speed. The selections range from "By SPD", which will autoselect timing settings as to what the Serial Presence Detect chip on the Ram , to 200%. For all of our testing, Sync was chosen, because we've found that the greatest performance and stability comes from using a synchronized CPU and Memory bus on current AMD based systems as well as the nForce2.
Whether it's because this is an evaluation board, or because ASUS is planning way ahead, it's hard to tell, but the SDRAM timing settings for Active Precharge Delay, RAS to CAS Delay, and RAS Precharge Delay start very low, at 1. Active Precharge Delay ranges from 1-15, and was set at 5 for benchmarking. On the other hand, SDRAM CAS Latency only offers 2, 2.5, and 3T options, leaving 1.5T optimists a bit disappointed. I have yet to get our Corsair 3500 to run at 1.5T, however, so I don't think it's an issue.
CPU Vcore can be set from 1.650V to 1.850, as shown in the two vidcaps above. For benchmarking, the system was set to 1.700V, and ran stable, without fail. When overclocked, the CPU VCore was set to 1.850V, and again, ran without a problem. The range isn't as broad as we see on some boards and we very much would have liked to have seen a 1.95v setting as it has been needed to find the top-end OC with some retail AMD CPUs we have OCed here in the Bunker.
The AGP aperture range is the norm. Another nice feature of this board is the ability to OC the AGP frequency as well or simply leave it at spec. Those of you looking to pull every point out of a 3DMark score will very much appreciate this. The board offers an Auto setting, to select the best possible option based on your CPU FSB speed, or a range from 50 - 100 MHz, with increments of 1MHz between 66 and 87MHz. A tweakers delight to be sure.
The DDR Reference Voltage is limited to a range between 2.6 and 2.8V, which proved to be sufficient for the benchmarking portion of the review. With another .1V or .2V, additional stability might be guaranteed at higher speeds without threatening damage to the RAM DIMMs. This of course is a matter of opinion. Also, the AGP VDDQ Voltage ranges from 1.5 to 1.7V, and that seems to be plenty as we are not seeing many AGP OCs relying on more voltage beyond what is given in the menu.
The Integrated Peripherals screen offers more of the expected options. You have the ability to enable or disable almost every onboard device, as well as select what USB versions to support, for those rare devices that will not work properly under USB2.0, and insist on USB1.1 support. (To a bit clearer, the board does not have seperate banks for USB1.1 and USB2.0. All jacks can be set to support USB2.0, which is something we will certainly be seeing more and more of.)
And finally, we have the hardware monitor screen. It shows the relative temperatures and fan speeds, as well as the option to enable or disable the Q-Fan feature which acts as a sort of BIOS fanbus, allowing for a quiet system under lighter loads.