Asus A8N32-SLI initial impression....WOW!

[jiff]

Now all we need is a Vdimm mod, then Im sold.
DFI wont see my cash again

[ben805]

Now another question arise.....how well does this motherboard perform under subzero?? I guess I'll have to answer that questions myself....hehe, I'm going to prep the motherboard for a single stage phase change now and see if this A8N32 allow me to push my opty to the next level, couple weeks ago with the DFI Ultra-D I was able to passed OCCT and SPI 32M @3.40Ghz, I'm curious to see if I can breach that wall with this Asus, more results to follow soon.....

[situman]

Well then you can ask the question of why bother with watercooling, why bother with ram that will give you 20mhz more. Why bother buying a $260 board when you get a $100 one that will do 1.58v. Hell why even bother overclocking at all?

-watercool so we can go beyong stock volts, but even watercooling has its limits

-ur right who the heck needs a 260 dollar motherboard anyways, then again the evil side of us wants the latest and newest, and it might not be the best.

-ram and cpu two different thing can't compare really.

-we overclock to get the most bang, dollar wise, not having the chip explode cause we pumped too much volts into it. Besides these days who really "overclocks" anymore? All I hear about is people buying GTX, XT this, Platinum that. Ain't much of a value there. Some are willing to buy 1k dollar cpus. You're right why the hell do we even overclock when a lot of us always go for the highest price item there is or mucho dinero items? This place needs to be changed to extremespenders.com forums. Then again, this phenomenon seems to happen mostly on the videocard and AMD side. Intel guys still go for the lowest model and overclock the heck out of it while we purchase 400 dollar dualcore AMD cpus.

[situman]

Now another question arise.....how well does this motherboard perform under subzero?? I guess I'll have to answer that questions myself....hehe, I'm going to prep the motherboard for a single stage phase change now and see if this A8N32 allow me to push my opty to the next level, couple weeks ago with the DFI Ultra-D I was able to passed OCCT and SPI 32M @3.40Ghz, I'm curious to see if I can breach that wall with this Asus, more results to follow soon.....

arent u limited on volts? or does it need less volts the colder it is?

[ben805]

arent u limited on volts? or does it need less volts the colder it is?

my 148 opty is not bound by the vcore limation and I do not have any problem with getting 1.75+v, I would never ever put more than 1.65v through any cpu so the 1.7~1.77v is pretty much useless to me and I don't really care for. As I said before I think somehow the Asus detected certain code from the cpu to determine where to put a cap on certain chips, so far lowdog and trza2k had found their dually to capped at 1.58, and his 3200 was capped at around 1.64v, so this limitation varies. Will lower temperature being able to shift the cap? that I don't know unless I have a dual core or 3200 to test just for the hell of it, but for now I'm only interested in finding out how well it perform under subzero.....be back with results later.

[ben805]

here's some screenie of the seal string in place, I also took out the metal backplate and have to grease and seal the back to prevent condensation as well, will fire up the phase change soon...

[Psyche911]

ben, did you happen to check if the copper mosfet heatsink has thermal paste under it, since the other one doesn't?

[ben805]

ben, did you happen to check if the copper mosfet heatsink has thermal paste under it, since the other one doesn't?

yes I had already checked the copper heatpipe, they have thermal goo on SB, NB and under that chunk of copper fins so I don't see any benefit to mess with them the aluminum mosfet sink is the only one that doesn't has anything on.

[mag|c]

here's some screenie of the seal string in place, I also took out the metal backplate and have to grease and seal the back to prevent condensation as well, will fire up the phase change soon...

lookin' good, lookin' good, show us some resaults already!

[ben805]

I think I found a damn cold bug on this mobo....can't confirm yet but I'm working on it now, the vcore overvolt is giving me a hard time so far I only get it up to 3.30 @1.50v, will keep trying and see what happen next...

update2: Under subzero so far the only bios that work well for me is 703, bios 804 and 805 do not like the cold, they might work for you so try them out and see what happen. Bios 502 is very problematic, if my overclock is unstable and can't get a POST, power cycling the PC with the insert or delete key pressed WILL NOT force the bios back to default setting, I had to removed the battery and disconnected the power for about 5min for the cmos to reset, took me a good 30min just to get the sucker to boot again, stay away from this version at all cost as I do not see any cmos reset jumper on this mobo! version 703 and up allow me to force the default setting with insert key.

I do not know if this is a bios issue or not but I've found that the vcore display on bios and PC Probe are very inaccurate...or I should say it's rather useless, the vcore sensor always show 1.48~1.50v whenever I set it from anywhere around 1.45 to 1.56v. The cpu temperature display on PC Probe is a joke, the BIOS shows the cpu temperature at -21'C but PC Probe reports it at +21'C, it's funny to see it went from +21'C down to +17'C when I started Prime, probably have the same bug as the Smartguardian and can't report subzero properly.

Overclocking under the phase change was not as smooth as I'd expected and part of the reason is that my expectation was a bit unrealistic, I was wishing for 3.50Ghz but 3.40 is pretty much the limit of this chip on single stage...as far as max clock goes it makes no difference on this board or the Ultra-D.

The windows version of Asus Update only allow you to upgrade the version, for downgrade you'll have to use the dos utility, after flashing the bios from DOS make sure you do a cold boot then load the default setting, and put all your settings back afterward, otherwise the power management and few other settings in the bios will get all whacky and windows might not load up anymore. In the mean time...I kinda missed the DFI's CMOS reloaded, it could come in handy from time to time.

[lowdog]

Well don't know what to think about this....but a guy just mentioned to me that a friend of his that works at Asus said the A8N32 had been recalled because it was frying cpu's with certain types of PSU's and there were other things still unknown.

Now I'm not saying this is a fact, I just don't know what the hell is the truth regarding this matter any more.

[Perc]

damm mb keeps sellin out at newegg arrrgg! whats with asus why cant they freakin send enough mbs for them to stay in stock longer then 3hrs!

peace perc,

[situman]

Perhaps the limited availability is due to Asus rigorously testing the available boards in stock and only ship those that passes the test. Might be a good thing since there's only been one case of someone killing their cpu.

[jw0rd]

I just received my Asus A8N32-SLI mobo from newegg today, I checked every single inch of this mobo for that rumor's "Rev 2.0 sticker" but it is no where to be found....

Well the Ebay rumor was that they won't ship to vendors for a few more days...but we'll see.

[cronic]

damm mb keeps sellin out at newegg arrrgg! whats with asus why cant they freakin send enough mbs for them to stay in stock longer then 3hrs!

peace perc,

Are you referring to today, as I don't see that they have had any since Thurs, and I show a 11/22 eta.

[cronic]

Well don't know what to think about this....but a guy just mentioned to me that a friend of his that works at Asus said the A8N32 had been recalled because it was frying cpu's with certain types of PSU's and there were other things still unknown.

Now I'm not saying this is a fact, I just don't know what the hell is the truth regarding this matter any more.

This has got to be one of the strangest product launch I have ever seen. I am totally confused at this point. The auction on ebay that started this whole rumor was pulled, then relisted and said it was pulled due to a prize giveaway. I have tried contacting him twice as to the rev. 2.0 deal and still no response.

[ben805]

uhmmm....yea, my brother's best friend's sister's fiance's cousin's ex-husband's uncle also said that Asus is going to secretely mail out a US$500 check to those who registered this product with them, they also said there's a huge overclocking contest schedule on December 17th 2005 at 12pm that is sponsor by Asus, the competition will be held in California at the Sparkomatic stadium, the top overclocker award is a brand spanking new 2006 SVT Mustang, 2nd place is Geo Metro and 3rd place will be half a dozen of FX-57 so make sure you sign up for this jaw-dropping contest, they said even the worst overclockers will get a free special t-shirt that has the signature of the world famous champion gamer named Mrknow Itall.

But wait, I also heard from somewhere that Asus just bought out Abit but they're working around the clock on their newest chipset that is suppose to have 4 trillion transistors, watch out nvidia!!

[cronic]

uhmmm....yea, my brother's best friend's sister's fiance's cousin's ex-husband's uncle also said that Asus is going to secretely mail out a US$500 check to those who registered this product with them, they also said there's a huge overclocking contest schedule on December 17th 2005 at 12pm that is sponsor by Asus, the competition will be held in California at the Sparkomatic stadium, the top overclocker award is a brand spanking new 2006 SVT Mustang, 2nd place is Geo Metro and 3rd place will be half a dozen of FX-57 so make sure you sign up for this jaw-dropping contest, they said even the worst overclockers will get a free special t-shirt that has the signature of the world famous champion gamer named Mrknow Itall.

But wait, I also heard from somewhere that Asus just bought out Abit but they're working around the clock on their newest chipset that is suppose to have 4 trillion transistors, watch out nvidia!!

hehehehe

[pcdoc1]

LOL

[chunkylover77]

Holy cow I've gotta book the flight. A free T shirt is sweet.

[Supertim0r]

lol

[gundamit]

@ Ben - Sorry if this is slightly OT - but I just wanted to ask about the prep work you did on the CPU for phase testing. It took me a while to figure out what I was looking at because I've never seen this technique before. It looks like you applied the seal string directly to the IHS-less (a.k.a. naked) CPU, leaving only the core exposed. I can make out the "bumpers" you put on the CPU to prevent crushing or chipping. What the heck is the the rectangular shape directly below the core? Can you post a shot of the evap head attached. Thanks.

[cronic]

what is the difference between neophrene and "seal string" all i have ever used for phase is neophrene.

[craig588]

Neoprene foam comes in sheets like cloth (I can't think of a better way to describe it, but it's still a bad description)

Steal String is like putty. Seal String is incredibly overpriced and should be avoided. For 10$ you can get about 20 times as much as is included in a roll of seal string from Home Depot, it's called cork tape.

[ben805]

@ Ben - Sorry if this is slightly OT - but I just wanted to ask about the prep work you did on the CPU for phase testing. It took me a while to figure out what I was looking at because I've never seen this technique before. It looks like you applied the seal string directly to the IHS-less (a.k.a. naked) CPU, leaving only the core exposed. I can make out the "bumpers" you put on the CPU to prevent crushing or chipping. What the heck is the the rectangular shape directly below the core? Can you post a shot of the evap head attached. Thanks.

hehe....that's worn out black electrical tape on the cpu that you're looking at, I do this to all naked chips to protect those little ICS around the core, they also provide cushion whenever I mount heatsink or evap head on them to prevent chipped core...pretty much a double edged sword, there's no bumpers or feets...two layers of the tape is all you need. as you can see there are quite a few ICs have the print out showing on the tape, those ICs would of been crushed without the tape.