Asus A8N SLI Premium - NF4 SLI For AMD Refined

Benchmark Summary:

When all is said and done, judging these nForce 4 SLI AMD-based solutions, solely on performance, is an exercise in futility. All three of these nForce 4 SLI based motherboards, including our spotlight Asus A8N SLI Premium board that we tested in this article, performed at near identical levels in virtually every benchmark. Technically speaking, the Asus AN8 Premium scored the most first place finishes in our tests, followed by the A8N SLI Deluxe, and then the MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum SLI.  However all boards tested in most cases were within 2% of each other in raw performance metrics.  So, we're essentially left with differentiating feature sets, build quality, stability and price points of each motherboard tested, as the leading indicators with which we can asses the Asus AN8 SLI Premium's overall value.

What can be said about the new Asus A8N SLI Premium, that isn't obvious to you with all that you've seen in the pages preceding our summation here?   Frankly, not much.  The performance numbers speak for themselves.  The A8N SLI Premium's feature-set is second to none, with its dual on board SATA RAID controllers (one via the nForce 4 MCP), SLI Dual Graphics capability, dual Gigabit Ethernet controllers, and a completely silent cooling solution for the NVIDIA MCP (Southbridge) that also works to keep the CPU power array cool as well.  Finally, it terms of overclocking features and general "tweakability", the A8N SLI Premium is easily one of the best equipped boards we've seen come through the labs here for the Athlon 64 in a very long time.  And it performed admirably, overclocking our A64 FX-57 chip to a snappy 3.1GHz.

A quick HotHardware PriceGrabber search for the A8N SLI Premium shows the board weighing in at right around $175 and in stock at some very popular net retailers like NewEgg and ZipZoomFly.  This puts the board, along with it's well equipped bundle right in line with other boards we've recently tested in Marco's NF4 SLI Round-Up back in March.  Against the back-drop of all these other highly regarded nForce 4 SLI boards we've looked at thus far, the Asus A8N SLI Premium stands tall, as one of the best values available right now, if the Athlon 64 is your processor of choice and the ability to scale to Dual PCIe Graphics is something you would like to keep in your future.  We've rarely done this here at HotHardware but we're giving the Asus A8N SLI Premium our Editor's Choice Award, which it will now share with DFI's LANPARTY UT nF4 SLI-DR.

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