Asus A8N-SLI

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SLI technology, when working properly, is very impressive. Our GeForce 6600 GT cards typically showed performance gains between 75 and 80 percent when a second card was added to the system and connected via SLI mode. That’s quite impressive, considering no special code is needed for the games to take advantage of the technology; SLI just works with every DirectX and OpenGL game on the market. If the game stresses the GPU heavily, running the game on an SLI setup will make it run smoother; it’s as simple as that.

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Unfortunately though, while SLI setups are very impressive in terms of raw performance numbers, dual graphics cards make systems run hotter, louder, and require bigger power supplies. Single GPU setups are still, in our opinion, a much more elegant solution compared to dual cards in an SLI setup. In addition, our results show that nVidia still has some minor issues which need to be worked out with SLI before we can truly recommend it to everyone out there. Nevertheless, SLI is an impressive technological feat which nVidia should be given high marks for bringing to market.

The Asus A8N-SLI motherboard is the Athlon64 platform which high-end users should be looking at for a new system. The nForce4 chipset has quite a feature lead over competing Athlon64 platforms at this time, and has a dynamite setup onboard components, including dual GigE ports, a hardware Firewall, SATA-II RAID, SATA RAID-5, and ten USB 2.0 ports, not to mention PCI Express and SLI connectivity. While the boards are easily the most expensive Athlon64 platforms on the market today, the feature set is unmatched in comparison to other platforms. Asus’s reign at the top won’t last for long though, as similar nForce4 SLI boards from Gigabyte and MSI are on their way shortly. [...]