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Layout & Features
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This
well laid out motherboard has plenty of surface area with which to work. Asus
has wisely maintained the 4 mounting holes around the socket, thus providing
the user more flexibility to choose their favorite third-party cooling
solution. The star of the show, the
nForce2 SPP chip
(Northbridge) is cooled by way of a very substantial aluminum heat sink. We
removed the heat sink to find that thermal tape was used as the interface
material. As we always recommend, remove the thermal paste and use a thermal
compound material instead (our preference is Arctic Silver 3).
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Expansion is offered by way of a 1.5V AGP Pro slot/8X and 5 PCI slots.
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The
A7N8X has 3 x 184 pin DDR DIMM slots, accommodating up to 3GB total memory. As
is the case with the nForce2, dual-channel DDR 400 support is offered.
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The ATX
connector is well placed next to the IDE connectors on the edge of the
motherboard. We tend to like this placement as the ATX cables are more easily
managed and are less likely to interfere with other components.
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The I/O
configuration is outstanding, featuring 1 x Parallel port, 1 x Serial port, 1
each PS/2 Keyboard /Mouse port, 1 x Audio I/O, 4 x USB 2.0 ports, 1 x
Surround L/R audio jack, and 2 X RJ45 LAN ports.
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Support
for RAID 0/1 configurations is made possible courtesy of the onboard Silicon
Image® Sil 3112A Controller with 2 ports.
We are
extremely pleased with Asus’ decision to maximize the user’s experience by
offering the very robust
SoundStorm™
/ Dolby® Digital (AC-3) Encoder as part of the A7N8X integrated audio.
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