I’ve had an interesting time with the Asus A7N8x Deluxe. The motherboard has virtually every feature that one would expect from a modern Athlon chipset today. 6 USB 2.0 ports, 2 Firewire ports, 333MHz FSB compatibility AGP-8X , and support for memory up to 400MHz are all pluses that I took into consideration in giving my recommendation for this motherboard.

I would have liked to have seen support for Gigabit LAN and support for RAID for people without a Serial ATA hard drive, but these are minor nitpicks. Neither is widespread in today’s available motherboards. Another feature that is missing on this motherboard is 6 PCI slots. But with onboard sound fully the equal of the SB Audigy, and 2 LANs, the need for 6 is alleviated, for the most part.

In terms of performance and stability, the A7N8X is excellent in all three aspects. Performance of the un-overclocked 2400+ XP and AIW RADEON 9700 Pro is in-line with similar systems on Futuremark/Quake3. One note should be made of TwinBank. Notice, I’ve included performance results from 1 128MB stick/2 128MB sticks 1 256MB stick and 2 256MB sticks of RAM. The purpose of this testing is of course to show the benefits of using the TwinBank memory slots. While the difference isn’t big, it is there and a consideration when looking at the overall system.

I haven’t had a single crash, blue screen of death or other stability issue since the motherboard has been installed. Compatibility with other components is excellent. Stability is important to anyone needing a motherboard. The fact that I installed 5 different video cards from 5 different manufacturers and 3 different soundcards without issue bodes well for this motherboard.

The A7N8x Deluxe is an excellent motherboard that delivers on NVIDIA’s promise of a full-featured motherboard chipset when they announced it in July of 2002. It really is too bad that the motherboard didn’t make it to retail until late last year. Most of my friends that own a Athlon CPU have this board and all rave on the board. With the imminent launch of the 3000+ XP, this chipset and its K8 Crush successor will likely remain popular for a while yet. I’ll reserve judgment on the long-term usage of this motherboard until I’ve seen VIA’s KT400A chipset and SIS’s next Athlon XP chipset. For now, however, the A7N8X is among the fastest, most stable and compatible chipsets for the Athlon XP users.

1. Performance - 10
   
2. Features - 10
   
3. Compatibility - 10
   
4. Price - 8
   
5. Availability - 10
   
6. Setup - 10
   
7. Overall Value - 10
   
8. Ease of use - 10
   
9. Support - 9
   
10. Bundle - 8
    
    Total Score : 95