Advice re: NF4 mobos, upcoming purchase -- status of cooling issues?

[Chris Metzler]

Hi. I'm looking to go AMD64/PCIe very soon, and among the boards I
looking at are the A8N-SLI, A8N-SLI Deluxe, A8N-SLI Premium, and the
A8N-E. In terms of feature set alone, the A8N-E is really sufficient; but
I'm considering the others because I can afford them, and maybe I'll want
SLI down the line, and an extra 4 SATA ports (in the Deluxe and Premium
cases) might be nice, and so forth. I'm not planning to overclock.
Stability matters very, very much to me.

What I'm concerned about at this point is cooling issues. I've been doing
a lot of Googling, web forum browsing, etc., and it seems like there are a
flood of complaints about all but the SLI Premium right up to now -- the
complaint being that the NF4 chipset fan is not only very loud but likely
to fail after a few months of heavy use (which it will get from me).

The Premium, meanwhile, doesn't have those complaints since it uses a
heatpipe to cool the chipset; I haven't seen many complaints about this,
but I have seen a few, suggesting that the heatpipe isn't sufficient even
if you don't make the mistake of orienting the mobo poorly (with respect
to sending heat upwards).

So I'm curious to hear people's opinion about the status of cooling for
these boards right now. If you have one of these with stock heatsinks/
fans, are you happy with them in this regard?

Thanks,

-c

P.S. Extra points if you can answer a question I haven't been able to:
are the first Gb LAN interfaces on these boards on the PCIe bus? (I know
the second one that the Deluxe and Premium have is on the PCI bus instead)
Thanks.

 

[Malcolm]

Hi. I'm looking to go AMD64/PCIe very soon, and among the boards I
looking at are the A8N-SLI, A8N-SLI Deluxe, A8N-SLI Premium, and the
A8N-E. In terms of feature set alone, the A8N-E is really sufficient; but
I'm considering the others because I can afford them, and maybe I'll want
SLI down the line, and an extra 4 SATA ports (in the Deluxe and Premium
cases) might be nice, and so forth. I'm not planning to overclock.
Stability matters very, very much to me.

What I'm concerned about at this point is cooling issues. I've been doing
a lot of Googling, web forum browsing, etc., and it seems like there are a
flood of complaints about all but the SLI Premium right up to now -- the
complaint being that the NF4 chipset fan is not only very loud but likely
to fail after a few months of heavy use (which it will get from me).

The Premium, meanwhile, doesn't have those complaints since it uses a
heatpipe to cool the chipset; I haven't seen many complaints about this,
but I have seen a few, suggesting that the heatpipe isn't sufficient even
if you don't make the mistake of orienting the mobo poorly (with respect
to sending heat upwards).

So I'm curious to hear people's opinion about the status of cooling for
these boards right now. If you have one of these with stock heatsinks/
fans, are you happy with them in this regard?

Thanks,

-c

P.S. Extra points if you can answer a question I haven't been able to:
are the first Gb LAN interfaces on these boards on the PCIe bus? (I know
the second one that the Deluxe and Premium have is on the PCI bus instead)
Thanks.

Hi
I have recentley built up the following system;

Asus A8N-SLI Premium
Athlon 64 X2 4400+
Asus Extreme N6600GT Silencer Video Card
Corsair TWINX1024-3200C2PRO 1GB Kit
ThermalTake Tsunami Series Aluminum ATX Mid-Tower
Ultra X-Finity 600-Watt PSU
2 x 36GB WD Raptor HDD
1 x 200GB EIDE HDD
1 x Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-109

Running seti@home boinc client (x2) temperatures get to
CPU 40 degrees C
M/B 29 degrees C
Chipset 36 degrees C

No Load
CPU 28 degrees C
M/B 29 degrees C
Chipset 25 degrees C

BIOS rev 1009 with defaults and standard Heatsink/Fan as supplied.

Running SUSE linux 10.0 64bit with KDE 3.5 and have no issues at present,
mind you it is winter here in Mississippi ambient inside is around 18
degrees C.