Asus A8N-Premium vs Deluxe

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News_Reader

Do I understand that the specs of both boards are similar? Or am I missing
something? What would the minimum power requirement be for either of these
boards?
 
News_Reader said:
Do I understand that the specs of both boards are similar? Or am I missing
something? What would the minimum power requirement be for either of these
boards?
Click to expand...
Yes, they are similar, but not exactly the same. But you may not care about
the differences. One physical difference is that the premium has passive
cooling on the chipset with a heatpipe. The stock chipset HSF is noisy, and
many replace them with a quieter active HSF or just a passive HS.

The PSU power depends more on the peripherals than on the board. The most
important is the video (the SLI feature supports up to 2 video cards). With
a single Nvidia 6600GT and below, an high quality 380+ watt PSU will be
fine. High quality includes the Seasonic S12.

If you have a video card that needs an additional 12V power feed directly
from the PSU to the card, then I would get 500+ watts. Same applies if you
have a dual core CPU.
 
Hi Mark,

Im going to use a pci-e video card that does not need external power
connector, I have a smart power Antec 380w that I use now. There is a
defference on the Lan of the 2 boards is there not? Gigabyte on the deluxe
and 10/100 on the premium? How well does the premium heatpipe cool the
chipset?
 
News_Reader said:
Hi Mark,

Im going to use a pci-e video card that does not need external power
connector, I have a smart power Antec 380w that I use now. There is a
defference on the Lan of the 2 boards is there not? Gigabyte on the deluxe
and 10/100 on the premium? How well does the premium heatpipe cool the
chipset?
Click to expand...

No, they both have dual (2) on-board gigabyte LAN controllers. You can check
the specs here:
http://usa.asus.com/products3.aspx?l1=3&l2=15&l3=148&slname=NVIDIA nForce4 SLI

You might also want to consider the A8N-E if you don't need SLI and only
need one LAN interface.

I don't have any direct experience with the passive heatpipe chipset cooler.
 
"News_Reader" said:
Hi Mark,

Im going to use a pci-e video card that does not need external power
connector, I have a smart power Antec 380w that I use now. There is a
defference on the Lan of the 2 boards is there not? Gigabyte on the deluxe
and 10/100 on the premium? How well does the premium heatpipe cool the
chipset?
Click to expand...

Page 52 of the user's manual has power recommendations:

http://dlsvr03.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/socket939/A8N-SLI Premium/e1952_a8n-sli_premium.pdf

The Deluxe and Premium seem to use the same Marvell GbE. Specs are here:

http://usa.asus.com/products4.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=375&l1=3&l2=15&l3=148
http://usa.asus.com/products4.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=539&l1=3&l2=15&l3=148

The heat pipe on the Premium, will only be as good as the
source of cooling air flowing over the MOSFET heatsink at the
end of the pipe. If you are air cooling the processor, you will
get a bit of airflow from the processor fan. That appears to be
the design intent of the heatpipe and heatsink. If you were to
use water cooling for the processor, you would need to place a fan
next to the MOSFET heatsink, to provide some cooling air. A person
using water cooling would probably be better off with the Deluxe.

The heatpipe also doesn't work well, if the motherboard is inverted
180 degrees from its normal position in a tower style case. There
are just a couple of computer cases that mount the motherboard
upside-down. This is not a problem with the vast majority of cases.

Paul
 
Page 52 of the user's manual has power recommendations:

http://dlsvr03.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/socket939/A8N-SLI Premium/e1952_a8n-sli_premium.pdf

The Deluxe and Premium seem to use the same Marvell GbE. Specs are here:

http://usa.asus.com/products4.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=375&l1=3&l2=15&l3=148
http://usa.asus.com/products4.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=539&l1=3&l2=15&l3=148

The heat pipe on the Premium, will only be as good as the
source of cooling air flowing over the MOSFET heatsink at the
end of the pipe. If you are air cooling the processor, you will
get a bit of airflow from the processor fan. That appears to be
the design intent of the heatpipe and heatsink. If you were to
use water cooling for the processor, you would need to place a fan
next to the MOSFET heatsink, to provide some cooling air. A person
using water cooling would probably be better off with the Deluxe.
Click to expand...

Right on. With an air-cooled CPU, though, it works beautifully. I
have an XP120; the fins are parallel with the chipset heatsink which
prevents the CPU fan from blowing directly on that heatsink (if the
fins were perpendicular, there'd be a virtual gale), but it still
keeps the chipset below 42° which means that it's barely warm to the
touch. Mine's actually 37° now at idle with the room temp at 22°. So
the fact is that it needs a fan, but it seems to need only a small
volume of air flow directly on the heatsink to work extremely well.
The heatpipe also doesn't work well, if the motherboard is inverted
180 degrees from its normal position in a tower style case. There
are just a couple of computer cases that mount the motherboard
upside-down. This is not a problem with the vast majority of cases.
Click to expand...

From the experience of A8N-SLI Premium owners who have reported
results with the particular Lian Li cases that require "upside-down"
mounting, you could go further and say that the heatpipe cooler
doesn't work at all in this configuration. Users have reported
chipsets that are literally too hot to even touch.


Ron
 
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