Board Revision: 1.02

BIOS Version: 1003 Beta

The A8N-SLI Deluxe is the proud and rightful flagship of the Asus line of Athlon 64 boards. It goes without saying that it features NVIDIA's nForce4-SLI chipset; thus, it offers two x16 PCIe slots, spaced far enough apart to accommodate even graphics cards with monstrous cooling solutions.

The chipset features a sound system, a 1 Gbit network controller, four SATA connectors, two UltraATA/100 channels and a whopping ten USB 2.0 ports. Asus has back-panel connectors for four of them, while the rest require adapters. Also included are a Gigabit Ethernet chip, and a SATA RAID controller from Silicon Image (Sil3114). A FireWire chip from Texas Instruments is also present.

The nForce4 chip sports an active cooler, which we are usually quick to criticize due to their generally high noise level. But the component makes sense here, more for mechanical reasons than for overclocking purposes. Fast graphics cards with extravagant cooling solutions could quickly collide with a huge passive cooling element, so the smaller size of an active cooler is a wise choice.