With PCI Express and DDR2 memory support for AMD chips a little way off, it's been left to Via and nVidia to provide the best support for these processors with the KT800 and nForce3 respectively. The K8N-E Deluxe from Asus is the latest motherboard we've seen to use nVidia's nForce3 250Gb chipset.
Designed for Athlon 64, the Deluxe is built around a 754pin socket. It's a tidy board with plenty of room around all the major components; in fact, it's so well laid out that you may not notice how feature-rich it is.
The 250Gb chipset offers an 800MHz system bus, two Serial ATA (Sata) connectors, support for up to eight USB2 ports and a dedicated channel for Gigabit Ethernet, controlled by a Marvell chip.
There are a further four Sata ports, controlled by a Silicon Image chip, integrated 7.1 audio via Realtek's ALC850 chip and a Firewire port. Three Dimm slots support up to 3GB of PC3200, PC2700, PC2100 or PC1600 DDR memory.
The two nForce3 Sata ports can be set up in a Raid array with Raid 0, 1, 0+1, or as a Jbod (just a bunch of disks). The other four may be configured into Raid 0, 1, 10, 5 or Jbod arrays.
The board has two ATA 133 connectors, which, with the main ATX power connector, are mounted near the right-hand edge of the board.
As with all high-end Asus boards, the K8N-E Deluxe comes with all the cables, manuals and Asus software utilities.
Contact: Asus http://uk.asus.com
Specifications:
- Socket 754 for AMD Athlon 64
- nVidia nForce3 250GB
- 3 memory slots (PC3200, PC2700, PC2100, PC1600)
- 8 AGP graphics
- 5 PCI slots
- 1 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet
- 2 parallel slot
- 6 Sata ports
- 4 USB2
- 2 PS/2
- 1 serial port
- 1 parallel port
- 1 Gigabit Ethernet
- 1 FireWire
- 6 audio
- 1 coaxial S/PDIF out
- 1 optical S/PDIF out
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