"Frohike" said:
Dudes,
What are the differences between the A8N-SLI, A8N-SLI Deluxe and the Premium
motherboards? I'm building a gaming gear using the deluxe or the premium if
it has something I would really need for an upgrade in the future. Thanks.
The easiest way to answer this question, is to download a copy of
Asusworld magazine (not really worth the download, but anyway...)
http://www.asus.com/emagazine.htm
http://www.asus.com/emagazine/asusworld/asusworld36.zip (~40MB)
Page 1 of 176-208-MOTHERBOARD-AUG.pdf document has a comparison table.
A8N-SLI is minus the following items:
1) SIL3114 RAID with 4 SATA channels.
AFAIK, this sits on the PCI bus.
2) Marvell Gigabit Ethernet (but still has Nvidia native GbE connector)
AFAIK, this sits on the PCI bus.
3) Vocal POST reporter chip (so no voice error messages from BIOS)
A8N-SLI Deluxe and A8N-SLI Premium have those items.
The Premium has an electronic selector for SLI versus non-SLI
mode. The Deluxe uses a pluggable paddle card, to reroute the
PCI Express lanes. The Premium uses some high speed chips to
do the routing instead, so no paddle card needed. (Note -
an open question as to which of these schemes affects the
ability to overclock PEG link - not that most people care.)
The electronic switch is handy if you switch between SLI
and non-SLI modes a lot - maybe something to do with multi-monitor
config or wanting to use TV out or the like, which SLI mode
doesn't allow ? (not 100% sure)
The Premium also gets rid of the chipset fan. It uses a heat
pipe to move the heat from the chipset, up to the MOSFET
heatsink next to the processor. As long as the CPU cooling
fan "spills" cooling air over the MOSFET heatsink, the
Premium stays cool, and without a 5000-8000 RPM chipset fan.
Only downside - there are a couple of Lian Li computer
cases, that mount ATX boards upside-down, and this causes
a drop in the efficiency of the Premium heatpipe. As long
as the mounting scheme is "standard ATX" and there is air
moving over the MOSFET heatsink, should be no problems
with the Premium. (The Deluxe had problems with dead
chipset fans, so the Premium is welcome relief.)
One thing I cannot work out, is the Premium has a PCI-E
x4 connector, while the Deluxe has a x1 connector in
the same position. According to Nvidia:
http://www.nvidia.com/page/pg_20041015917263.html
"NVIDIA nForce4 SLI:
Five independent PCI Express controllers with 20 total
lanes that can be configured as follows:
One x16 and four x1 PCI Express lanes ·
Two x8 and three x1 PCI Express lanes (SLI Mode)
This means the Premium's PCI-E x4 connector, has x2 lanes
connected to it. ~500MB/sec in each direction max.
While SLI has a certain bling-bling charm to it, in many
situations it won't pay off unless the monitor you use
has a huge resolution. If you play at 1280x1024, you can
likely live with a carefully selected single card. With
gaming now, in many situations you are CPU limited, no
matter how good a CPU you buy. (This will not change
until game software makes better use of multiple cores.)
If you like 1920x1440 resolution and high antialiasing
settings, plus 300 watts of heat blowing into the room,
then SLI might be just the thing
An "SLI certified"
class power supply is recommended for high end SLI use.
(List is near the bottom of the page. Note - I do not
recommend any supply with quad 12V rails, for use with
the A8N-SLI. This is due to the use of Asus EZ-Plug for
powering the video cards. That plug shorts two of the
12V outputs together on a quad output supply - namely
the mobo power +12V pins to the drive power +12V pin. The
Turbocool 850 is quad output (CPU0, CPU1, mobo, drives).
Using single or dual 12V output supplies is safe for
A8N-SLI - for triple or quadruple outputs, contact the
power supply company to see whether it is safe to connect
a product to the A8N-SLI. In other words, using supplies
from this Nvidia listing is not without issues.)
http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone_build.html
http://www.pcpowercooling.com/products/power_supplies/dual_cpu_selector/
For quad supplies, this is the level of detail you want.
http://www.silverstonetek.com/downloao/installation guide/v2st65zfspecs.pdf
Notice how the 24 pin motherboard connector runs on +12V3
and a disk drive (Molex) connector runs on +12V4. Using
EZ-Plug shorts +12V3 to +12V4. One would hope that the
PCI Express six pin power connectors (not used on many
cards), are independent of the motherboard +12V3
powered pins on the PCI express edge connector. In the
case of this Silverstone supply, the PCI Express six pin
connector happens to be running from +12V3, so no danger
there. Picking up all these details, is why I recommend
using a single 12V output or a dual 12V output - they still
need to have high enough current ratings for the load
(a separate topic). If you can actually contact tech support
at these power supply companies, maybe they can answer these
questions better than I can.
HTH,
Paul
