The times, they are a changin. AMD introduced its lineup of Athlon 64-bit processors almost a year ago. They were tempting speed-demons capable of performing both 64-bit and 32-bit processes. Basically, this meant you could upgrade to a 64-bit processor without having to wait for the 64-bit version of Windows to be released. All the benefits of forward-compatibility without any of the negatives of having to rebuy all your software packages. Great! Why didn't they catch on? The mighty dollar struck again and all of the new 64-bit hardware was just too expensive.
Well, a year really makes a difference in the computer industry. First, prices have dropped significantly from last year, making 64-bit computers a feasible of reality for us little folk. In addition, ASUS and Nvidia got their acts together after releasing a dismal nForce3 150Gb motherboard and released this -- the K8N-E Deluxe nForce3 250Gb.
This socket 754 (most AMD Athlon 64 Processors are socket 754 however the newest of the new is socket 939 now) motherboard comes loaded for bear with everything you could possible need for today's multimedia machine.
Let's start with I/O devices. You've got your PS/2 connectors for ancient keyboards and mice. For those of you not living in the Dark Ages, the motherboard comes with eight (8) USB2.0 ports and a built-on IEEE1394 (firewire) port with the ability to add an expansion slot with yet another firewire port.
That's fine, but there are a whole lot of other ports here that do nifty stuff; let's talk about Realtek's ALC850 8-channel onboard sound with BOTH coaxial and optical digital-out as well as standard speaker outputs. Even Creative Labs' Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS doesn't come with SPDIF (optical) out. And the Sound Manager program handles all of the adjustments and configuration issues for any speaker system available with expert ease. The sound quality is absolutely superb.
For hard drive support, you've got your standard two IDE channels capable of each handling two drives (overall support for four drives). In addition, you also get six (6) Serial ATA controllers. Yes, that's right, I said SIX. Two of which are controlled by the BIOS itself with the remaining four controlled by the spectacular onboard Sil 3114 controller chip.
ASUS didn't stop there, though. They decided to throw in gigabit ethernet. Yep, no 10/100 Ethernet for this monster, you've got the ugpradability of 10/100/1000 Ethernet.
As far as stability goes, this motherboard runs like a champ. We've even run some performance numbers for you on the very system being used to write this review:
The original specs of this PC were as follows: an Athlon XP 2600+ processor running on an ASUS A7N8X2.0-Deluxe motherboard (check out our review by clicking here) with 1024MB of matched pair Mushkin Level-One memory running with RAID-0 Western Digital 36.7GB Raptor hard drives (for a combined 20,000RPM and 16MB of cache) and a Powercolor ATI Radeon 9700 Pro video card. The PCMark2001 results looked like this:
Athlon XP 2600+ System
CPU Score: 6311
Memory Score: 5131
HDD Score: 2100
3DMark2001: 14322
3DMark2003: 4855
The only components changed were the motherboard and the processor. Everything else remained the same for the following PCMark2001 results:
Athlon 64 3200+ System
CPU Score: 7186
Memory Score: 8067
HDD Score: 2303
3DMark2001: 17357
3DMark2003: 5269
Granted, the CPU Score is completely dependent on the new Athlon 64 3200+ chip we threw down but the rest are completely motherboard-determined. Performance increases by just changing out the motherboard and processor looked like this:
Percentage Increase
CPU Score: 113% faster
Memory Score: 157% faster
HDD Score: 110% faster
3DMark2001: 122% faster
3DMark2003: 109% faster
Yes, the time has come for 64-bit processing despite the fact that the 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows XP isn't due until later this year or early 2005. The ASUS K8N-E Deluxe motherboard is spectacular bringing faster overall performance to every aspect of computer use. If you're looking for a motherboard to carry you years into the future, you need not look any further than the ASUS K8N-E Deluxe 250Gb.
