I ran the gamut of stability software and torture tests. Prime95’s torture test ran for 24 hours without issue at the default clock speed of 2000 MHz (2400+ XP). As I don’t overclock, and the chipset doesn’t support much in terms of overclocking anyway, I won’t go into how stable the board is at a higher FSB speed. In writing this review, I’ve spent the last week playing games with the test system, running applications and haven’t encountered a single issue with Windows, stability or error reports in XP.

Test System

Athlon 2400+ XP
Asus A7N8x Deluxe
2 128MB DDR300 sticks of Crucial Memory
60GB Western Digital Hard drive 2MB cache, 8.9ms seek time
Onboard sound
16x Toshiba DVDROM
24x 16x 40x Toshiba CDRW
ATI All in Wonder RADEON 9700 Pro using 6218 drivers (02.5 Catalysts)
Windows XP Home
DirectX 8.1
Microsoft Intellimouse 2.0
Microsoft Internet Keyboard Pro

Test Software

SpecViewPerf 7.1
SYSmark 2002
3DMark 2001 SE Build 330
Quake3 1.30 Time demo 4

Compatibility Testing
It’s important, to me at least, to check the compatibility of the tested motherboard with a variety of soundcards/video cards. After all, what good is a new motherboard if it’ll have issues with new video cards, soundcards and other components? My reference nForce1 motherboard, for example, has a issue with the Matrox Parhelia, causing lockups while running 3d games under Direct-3D.

Other motherboards, seem to have issues with AGP8x being enabled. Thankfully, in testing the Parhelia on the A7N8X, the crashes present on the reference nForce1 motherboard are not present. Something could be said about my using Parhelia when I have an AIW 9700 pro, but in terms of trying compatibility, it’s important to present as complete a picture as possible. Other video cards tested without issues were a: Geforce4 Ti4200, a SIS Xabre400 and Kyro-II.

I tested two AGP8x supporting video cards for this review. NVIDIA provided me with a Geforce4 Ti4200 8x to test AGP8x as well. AGP8x and Fast-Writes were correctly identified and installed with the latest reference drivers. No problems were present in the few hours I used the video card with it enabled. ATI's AIW 9700 pro also correctly installed AGP8x and Fast-Writes

The soundcards I used also showed no issues. Previously, I had a issue with my SB Live and a VIA chipset and IRQs, which VIA subsequently fixed. With the A7N8X, there were no issues with using the SB Audigy that I use when testing compatibility. Other soundcards tested without issue were a Typhoon Hurricane Extreme from ESS-Tech and a SB Live 5.1 X-Gamer from Creative Labs.