Anybody knows why Asus have changed the direction the chipset is pointing on their latest MB.

Compared to Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe the chipset is turned 45 degres on the Asus A8N-SLI Premium.

Is it to make it more easy to install passive cooling on the north bridge while you have 2 VGA cards with big coolers?

The picture did not show so here is a link

http://www.tomshardware.com/motherboard ... ex-01.html

The new HSF is larger, probably not that horribly noisy, and since they didn't want to change the mobo layout in the chipset area, they had to tilt it. The mounting holes seem to be in the same positions as on my A8N-SLI Deluxe, so there should be no change for a custom cooling solution.

Is the only difference between the A8N-SLI Premium and Deluxe the software switched SLI mode and the different chipset cooler?

Thanks for the reply

According to the "Toms hardware" review of the premium MB, there is no other difference between the two.

Can I get some advice on which MB to buy?
I want it to be possible to passivly cool the north bridge, or at least make it very quiet.
And I want two geforce 6800GT in SLI installed with the zalman VF700-CU.

Since the Premium card is not out yet, I dont know if it is worth the wait.

Passive cooling of the nForce4 chipset (not just northbridge) requires good case airflow, or a low-speed fan blowing on the passive solution (probably NB47J). Otherwise, it can get hot, and I personally wouldn't be comfortable with that. With two 6800GTs and VF-700s you will need that good airflow. A possible solution would be to use the VF-700 on the upper card and a AC Silencer5 rev2 on the lower card. Oh, and you'll need a 24-pin PSU with high amperage on the 12V1 line, otherwise your SLI system will be unstable...

Thanks Tzupy

I have a Antec Sonata cabinet with 2 120mm fans for airflow. I can set the fanspeed myself, so will that be enough?

IIRC the Sonata has the front fan behind the HDD cage, so the front fan should be blowing more air onto the chipset heatsink. Otherwise, the Sonata doesn't have such a good airflow, the front intake is too small IMHO. Two 6800GTs are going to output over 150W of heat, and to get rid of it the case fans would have to spin at relatively high rpm, and be noisy. If I were you I would use a Silencer on the lower card and VF-700 on the upper. With two VF-700s the upper card would probably run ~10C hotter than the lower, since it's using already heated air for cooling.

Thanks Tsupy

I will take your advice into account.
I will start with only one 6800GT at first, as the price is to high at the moment for me to buy two.

Right now all of my fans are adjustable from the front of the PC, also the CPU fan. So when I am playing games I turn up the RPM, I can not hear them anyway because of the game sound.
When I use the computer for internet I adjust all the fans to 5V, and the silence is complete
I hope I will be able to make the same setup for my new hardware.

I do the same rpm upping for gaming. However, at low load, the nForce4 HSF (Thermalright NB-1) and the HDDs can get quite a bit warm if I lower the rpm of my front fan too much, like under 900 (Antec Tricool in SLK3000B).
The VF-700 on a 6800GT may require bending a few fins to make room for the NB47J.

Do you know how the silencer and the VF700 compare to eachother according to noise?

Well, I have a VM-101 on 6600GT, so I can only tell what I read about: the problem with the Silencer is the clicking that comes from the fan when the rpm is regulated using PWM. The new version of the Silencer is supposed to fix that. The general opinion on these forums is that the VF-700 is a better choice, but of course it doesn't exhaust air. And you'll have big problems mounting the Silencer on the upper card and a NB47J or other solution on the chipset (you can cut the Silencer's plastic shroud, but I'm not sure how wise is that).