Introduction

There isn’t a lot of motherboards on the market that enthusiast users think are truly capable of holding their special Athlon 939 processors – be it an Athlon 64/FX or newly released Opteron. The few motherboards that sit highly in a lot of overclockers mind is small and is really only dominated by two manufacturers right now: ASUS with their A8N-SLI Premium and newly released A8N32-SLI Deluxe and the other is DFI with their LANPARTY UT nF4 Ultra D and nF4 SLI-DR which has just been replaced by the SLI-DR Expert.

The chances are you own one of these motherboards if you’re into getting the absolute most out of your Athlon processor. Today we will be having a closer look at the A8N32-SLI Deluxe - the latest bad boy to hit the ASUS motherboard line up - and what it is capable of when it comes to overclocking. VGA performance was a bit all over the shop when we looked at the board last time but this time our emphasis will be more concentrated on low resolution benchmarking along with programs that concentrate more on the motherboard/chipset side of things. Last time we didn’t get a chance to look into overclocking because we only had the motherboard in our labs for 24 hours but now it’s a resident in the labs and we’ve had plenty of time to get down and dirty with it.

We have got with us in the black corner a set of brand new Corsair XMS-3500LL PRO memory which Corsair and ASUS say have been designed specifically for this particular motherboard. Sitting in a lovely gold tinge we have a set of PC3700 Gold Edition OCZ modules, which we’ll be putting up against the Corsair memory.

We won’t go into too much detail on the modules nor will we put too much emphasis on the motherboard we are using since a full review was posted on it not too long ago.