For those considering getting an A8N-SLI Asus board, I have to say having read all these forum threads I was wondering if I was making a mistake getting one, but I'm here to report that after some initial troubleshooting, the board is up and running without any glitches and if you're interested in knowing what works with the board from someone else's experience, you may find this post useful. Also you might encounter similar problems to what I did, and this might help resolve your situation.
Components:
Lian Li V1000 case
OCZ Powerstream 600W
AMD FX-55 CPU
Geforce 6800GT BFG OC 256MB
Corsair 4x512MB CPT 2-2-2-5 CAS
74gb WD Raptor SATA
WD 250 gb IDE 7000rpm
Seagate 300gb SATA 7000rpm
Motu 896 Firewire Sound Card
Plextor 716SA DVD-R/CD-RW SATA
Canopus DVStorm Video Editing Card
Radeon TV Wonder Pro
XP-120 Heatsink Thermaltake and thermal paste
Panaflo M1A 120mm for CPU fan
Apple Cinema 23" Monitor
Windows XP SP 2
Installing Problems
1) ?Failed CPU fan? : reason turned out to be panaflo m1a is a two pin fan that I had to use as the cpu fan since I was using a large xp-120 heatsink by thermaltake. The XP-120 fits without problems on this board in a Lian Li V1000 case, although I would recommend putting it in while the mobo is not yet screwed into the case panel, and if so, at least without the memory slots filled. The Panaflos are two pin connecting fans and hence are missing the 3rd which transmits fan speed so by hooking that up to the ?cpu fan? slot on the mobo, the bios was fooled into thinking it was broken. This resulted in the mobo making several beeping noises although it could be bypassed and continued into booting by hitting F1. Finally by upgrading the Asus A8N-SLI bios to 1.008 I was able to go to hardware management and disable the fan sensor. Also, I chose to later order a 3pin to 4pin adaptor to make sure the fan gets adequate power from the PSU and not blow out the cpu fan outlet on the mobo.
2) Consistent freezing, each time a disk was loaded into 716 SA Plextor DVD-R combo drive. Turned out to be a problem with the nvidia mobo drivers and the SATA chip which the manual specifically says to use for non RAID SATA Devices. The solution turned out to be plugging the 716 SA Plextor drive into the SATA RAID 1 slot (1-4) on the A8N-SLI board because these SATA slots were made by Promise, not Nvidia and hence more compatible with the Plextor 716SA. No problems since! Meanwhile I have the 74 GB Raptor hooked up to the non RAID SATA 1 slot, and the 300gb Seagate SATA hooked up to the non RAID SATA 2 slot without problems.
3) Windows XP installation not working ? Initial setup included an IDE drive I setup as a secondary (slave) for backup, and a SATA-WD 74gb Raptor for loading the system. I installed Windows XP (which incidentally worked fine even though #2 was not yet fixed) without problems, but when I tried to reboot and install more drivers, it kept saying ?System boot failure?. Apparently the problem was related to having two hard drives (one on SATA the other on IDE) combined. Windows prefers to look for the IDE drive for boot.ini (because it gives it the higher letter drive assignment by default ? i.e. C: and the SATA drive D), and was unable to figure out (despite the BIOS being setup correctly to boot using the SATA drive first) that the boot.ini file was on the SATA drive not the IDE drive. Solution was to disconnect the IDE drive, and reinstall Windows XP with only the SATA drive to worry about (hence given the proper C: assignment and no problems with proper boot.ini placement).
4) By fixing #3, I accidentally installed two different windows XP installations on the same drive. To remove the faulty 2nd installation and avoid the ?choose which operating system you want to boot?, I had to go to system, advanced, then to system settings, then you can edit the boot.ini file and also change the time delay of the above prompt (default 30 seconds)
5) OCZ Powerstream 600W too large for Lian Li V1000 case, so had to hammer/chisel out the rivets holding in a panel separating psu from the hard drive racks. Works fine and I think better this way since the panel blocks air flow that the OCZ PSU can provide when unblocked.
6) Also had green flickering pixels on the screen (Apple Cinema 23?) that did not resolve until I moved the ADC to DVI converter away from the power plugs that were cluttered in the corner.
I am not using SLI until Nvidia figures out how to make SLI compatible with the Apple Cinema monitors.
The system flies, is rock stable, and I couldn't be happier. Took me two days to trouble shoot the above problems but hopefully less for you if you read this post.
