Got this board after my miserable failure with Creative Live and ASUS A8N SLI premium, and everything went smoothly so far. Here are some quick pro's and con's
PRO's:
-- Of course the true 2x16 PCIe, at reasonable cost --- $25 more than ASUS A8N SLI premium.
-- ROCK solid, no problem at all with all latest drives from Nvidia.
-- Big space between the two PCIe 16x slots.
-- Onboard Creative audigy. VERY SWEET. This actually matters, because the Asus (and all other brands) onboard solution has higher CPU usage and much lower quality. If you try to add your own sound card, ugly IRQ problem occurs.
-- You can use second PCIe slot if your heatsink is too big, or if you feel the CPU-NorthBridge-PCIe1 area is too busy, which is usually true for all boards.
-- LOTS of tweaks in BIOS, probably more than you need. I have not tried them all yet, but you can check other review sites or OC sites.
-- Yes it can go DDR400 when 4 RAM chips are used (the manual it is DDR333, but you can set it in BIOS).
CON's
-- Heat pipe should be go further to the same place as ASUS A8N SLI premium. Right now if your video card has a big heatsink on the back (MSI manual says limit 1.5cm depth), it won't fit to PCIe1, you have to use PCIe2 (see above)
-- Not complete fanless design.
-- Memory slots are too close to each other, and weird location design. When you only use two chips, they have to be adjacent to each other to get double channel.
-- No RAID for Parallel IDE
-- The manual sucks, poorly written and lots of stuff are not explained.
I won't get into any performance stuff, as the board is almost exactly the same as other SLI boards, the difference will be on your CPU, RAM and Video card.
Conclusion:
The CON's are minor functionalities, inconvienences or cosmatic issues, and PRO's are on the most important areas for a motherboard.
HIGHLY recommanded over ASUS A8N SLI premium, for merely $25 more.
Compare to ASUS A8N32, this one provides more features, same performance, at much lower cost.
PRO's:
-- Of course the true 2x16 PCIe, at reasonable cost --- $25 more than ASUS A8N SLI premium.
-- ROCK solid, no problem at all with all latest drives from Nvidia.
-- Big space between the two PCIe 16x slots.
-- Onboard Creative audigy. VERY SWEET. This actually matters, because the Asus (and all other brands) onboard solution has higher CPU usage and much lower quality. If you try to add your own sound card, ugly IRQ problem occurs.
-- You can use second PCIe slot if your heatsink is too big, or if you feel the CPU-NorthBridge-PCIe1 area is too busy, which is usually true for all boards.
-- LOTS of tweaks in BIOS, probably more than you need. I have not tried them all yet, but you can check other review sites or OC sites.
-- Yes it can go DDR400 when 4 RAM chips are used (the manual it is DDR333, but you can set it in BIOS).
CON's
-- Heat pipe should be go further to the same place as ASUS A8N SLI premium. Right now if your video card has a big heatsink on the back (MSI manual says limit 1.5cm depth), it won't fit to PCIe1, you have to use PCIe2 (see above)
-- Not complete fanless design.
-- Memory slots are too close to each other, and weird location design. When you only use two chips, they have to be adjacent to each other to get double channel.
-- No RAID for Parallel IDE
-- The manual sucks, poorly written and lots of stuff are not explained.
I won't get into any performance stuff, as the board is almost exactly the same as other SLI boards, the difference will be on your CPU, RAM and Video card.
Conclusion:
The CON's are minor functionalities, inconvienences or cosmatic issues, and PRO's are on the most important areas for a motherboard.
HIGHLY recommanded over ASUS A8N SLI premium, for merely $25 more.
Compare to ASUS A8N32, this one provides more features, same performance, at much lower cost.
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