New AnandTech Review of K8N-E
AnandTech finally has a review of the K8N-E (date of article is 9/14):
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2206
Maybe Asus will read it and do something about the memory voltages. These are quotes from the various sections of the article:
"We were more than a bit surprised, however, to find the uneven range of adjustment options on the K8N-E. Perhaps this is a concession to the K8N-E appearing late in the 754 cycle, but we were particularly dismayed by memory voltage adjustments that top out at 2.7V. This is not even adequate for some of the best-performing memory on the market when you use 2 or more DIMMs at DDR400. Some of the fastest current memory requires 2.8V with 2 DIMMs at DDR400."
"Except for the inadequate memory voltages available, the overclocking controls are OK, if not noteworthy. The CPU voltage is wider than what we see on many competing boards, and the 200 to 300 CPU adjustments are average. Asus did not include any chipset voltage adjustments at all on the K8N-E, a feature that many will miss. Also, the HT range only extends to 4X in large 1X increments - a range to 5X like many competitors with finer 0.5X adjustments would have been useful. It was good to see Asus paying more attention to the FID/VID ratios, where finer 0.5X adjustments will be appreciated by any enthusiast."
"All-in-all, the K8N-E is a really mixed bag, with some adjustments that are exemplary, and others, missing or downright crude. With the attention that Asus has lavished on their VIA-chipset Athlon 64 boards, you have to wonder what they were thinking when designing the K8N-E. As you will see in our benchmark results, this lack of consistent OC controls with broad ranges is really a shame, since the Asus K8N-E is a fast 754 board.at stock speeds."
"The Asus K8N-E is also a surprisingly decent overclocker with 2 DIMMs, but the extremely limited memory voltage range is a serious problem for the Asus. Most of the fastest DDR400 that we have for testing cannot even be set at specification in the Asus, since manufacturers are specifying voltages around 2.8V for the latest Samsung TCCD memory."
One final quote that I fail to understand adequately as I never really thought about hard disk controllers having much to do with OCing a PC:
"The decision by Asus to use Silicon Image SATA instead is really a drawback in overclocking. Whether using the 2 nVidia SATA channels or any of the 4 Sil3114 channels, the highest overclock that we could achieve with our standard SATA drive was 230, much lower than some other nF3-250 boards. When using an IDE drive, the K8N-E fared better, reaching a stable 260 FSB at 1:1 before failing boot. While this is a much better overclock, it is still below the performances of the DFI, MSI, Epox, and Chaintech 754 boards that we have tested."
Anyone have comments about this controller issue?