Asus A7N8X Deluxe Motherboard

This is an NVIDIA nForce2 chipset based motherboard for AMD Athlon XP processors. The board has a 400 MHz FSB for the Athlon XP 3200+ and supports dual channel DDR 400 SDRAM, with a maximum of 3GBs. 

It’s a fairly feature clad board with AGP 8X pro slot, two LAN ports, 5 PCI slots, 2 SATA connectors with RAID 0/1, 6 USB ports, 2 FireWire ports, Realtek six channel sound with S/P DIF digital output.

We tested the motherboard with an AMD Athlon XP 3000+, 512 MB RAM, GeForce4 Ti 4600 graphics card and a 7200 RPM HDD. The board gave excellent scores in office and professional application benchmarks, Business Winstone and Content Creation Winstone 2001. The results are much better than even the P4 based Asus P4P 800 and Gigabyte boards.

But in Quake III Arena, it lagged behind by a wide margin, and in 3DMark 2001SE, the maximum difference was 10%.

S N   A   P   S   H O   T Price : Rs 9,500 (three-year warranty) Key specs : Good office and productivity app performance, graphics performance needs improvement Contact : AsusTek, Mumbai. Tel : 56926013 E-mail : info_india@asus. com.

Overall, a good board for AMD lovers, who want more power for regular and productivity applications than gaming and graphics. Add to that the plethora of features it offers and you have a good deal for the price.

Anoop Mangla