This is basically a ?don?t do what I did? to those poor souls who are about to buy an ASUS A8N-SLI or already have one. I am posting this as a very happy camper, having found a solution to ALL of the problems I have been having with the ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe.
It is called the DFI Lanparty Ultra-D. And swapping a motherboard was less painful than I thought.
I uninstalled ASUS specific drivers, swapped motherboards ? KEEPING my Windows installation, and a couple of reboots later to install new audio and network drivers, I have a completely stable and working system! I even gained 384MB of my 4GB of RAM back. (in 32Bit XP SP2)
The ASUS is a great board if you don?t mind:
Now I am running a great overclock ? better than the best I could get on ASUS, but 6 degrees cooler (lower voltage) with NO video artifacting, and using my RAM at 400Mhz rather than 333.
Everything just works, and it is so nice to not be waiting, hoping a BIOS or chipset update will fix things. The only downside was a lack of a parallel port, but I have fixed that with a PCI-Parallel port adapter.
DFI support is excellent, with a very visible web presence. And as their product actually works, I haven?t needed them yet.
It is a shame really, as ASUS used to be a brand name you could trust. But this board was an absolute lemon.
It is called the DFI Lanparty Ultra-D. And swapping a motherboard was less painful than I thought.
I uninstalled ASUS specific drivers, swapped motherboards ? KEEPING my Windows installation, and a couple of reboots later to install new audio and network drivers, I have a completely stable and working system! I even gained 384MB of my 4GB of RAM back. (in 32Bit XP SP2)
The ASUS is a great board if you don?t mind:
- Replacing the will-fail chipset fan yourself
Living with audio skips and static
Random lockups and mini-freezes, pauses in games.
Accepting that a second VGA card simply won?t work (tried 3 - non SLI issue)
Networking issues with onboard LAN
SATA drivers being too unstable to use, no matter what chipset or driver version you run.
(ps, none of the above were overclocking issues, this was at stock)
Running your RAM at much slower speeds if you have 4G
Having very little voltage control, for a "overclocking friendly" board. (Huge gaps in available voltage ? basically either too little or too much)
Now I am running a great overclock ? better than the best I could get on ASUS, but 6 degrees cooler (lower voltage) with NO video artifacting, and using my RAM at 400Mhz rather than 333.
Everything just works, and it is so nice to not be waiting, hoping a BIOS or chipset update will fix things. The only downside was a lack of a parallel port, but I have fixed that with a PCI-Parallel port adapter.
DFI support is excellent, with a very visible web presence. And as their product actually works, I haven?t needed them yet.
It is a shame really, as ASUS used to be a brand name you could trust. But this board was an absolute lemon.
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