ASUS announces new SLI motherboards w/ passive cooling

Waren_AlKar · Post by **Waren_AlKar** » Thu Sep 22, 2005 4:46 pm

Haven't seen this posted yet, so thought I'd mention it. It looks like ASUS has announced some new Athlon64 and Pentium 4 SLI motherboards. Besides having dual 16x PCI Express when using SLI (existing boards had dual 8x), it also uses a new heatpipe solution to take heat away from the chipset to two heatsinks at the 'back' near the I/O ports. It's going to come with two fans that can be mounted on these heatsinks if your using a water cooling or fanless CPU heatsink solution, otherwise it'll depend on existing airflow via case fans and the like.

You can read about it here and HardOCP also has some pictures on their news page here.

It's good to see a major motherboard manufacturer paying more attention to quiet cooling solutions. Hopefully the rest will start to follow suit. Now, if only this had been available when I'd bought my MSI K8N SLI Diamond...

mg1394 · Post by **mg1394** » Thu Sep 22, 2005 5:33 pm

Any reason for this board to be significantly better than the A8N-SLI premium?

mprezd · Post by **mprezd** » Thu Sep 22, 2005 6:11 pm

mg1394 wrote:Any reason for this board to be significantly better than the A8N-SLI premium?

Now has 16 pipelines rather than 8 per gpu. Also the 8 phase power which I believe adds heat dissipation.

mg1394 · Post by **mg1394** » Thu Sep 22, 2005 7:02 pm

Makes sense. Thanks.

len509 · Post by **len509** » Thu Sep 22, 2005 8:37 pm

Same info, but the pics work here:

AMDZone

Feyrhel · Post by **Feyrhel** » Thu Sep 22, 2005 9:19 pm

Any chance these will come out around the holidays? I might consider going with the new boards instead of an A8N Premium.

JonV · Post by **JonV** » Fri Sep 23, 2005 3:30 am

mprezd wrote:
mg1394 wrote:Any reason for this board to be significantly better than the A8N-SLI premium?
Now has 16 pipelines rather than 8 per gpu. Also the 8 phase power which I believe adds heat dissipation.

Pipelines? I don't think that's the word you're looking for here. Both SLI slots are PCIe 16x though, that's probably what you mean. It doesn't provide any improvement at all with current cards, but I guess it could be seen as good for future proofing your mobo investment.

noac · Post by **noac** » Fri Sep 23, 2005 6:14 am

Feyrhel wrote:Any chance these will come out around the holidays? I might consider going with the new boards instead of an A8N Premium.

Im told october.

stromgald · Post by **stromgald** » Fri Sep 23, 2005 7:54 am

Hmmm, just in time for Christmas, these motherboards have got me thinking about trying my first passive build. Well, I'll might keep those two fans on the mobo, but passive PSU and giant tower CPU cooler.

John Howard · Post by **John Howard** » Fri Sep 23, 2005 9:07 am

noac wrote:
Feyrhel wrote:Any chance these will come out around the holidays? I might consider going with the new boards instead of an A8N Premium.
Im told october.

Dude I'm told today

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/akiba/ho ... 2slid.html

BTW the heatpipe and the heatsink are all copper now. looks better than the a8n-sli premium but I don't like the placement of the pci slots. Also if asus could only move the atx12v like the DFI so we can use the S12

elec999 · Post by **elec999** » Fri Sep 23, 2005 9:58 am

Amazing products from Asus. I hope this board can kill DFI.
Thanks

rpsgc · Post by **rpsgc** » Fri Sep 23, 2005 11:00 am

Very poor placement of the PCI slots.

stromgald · Post by **stromgald** » Fri Sep 23, 2005 11:37 am

Yea, the PCI slot placement is questionable. What's the point of getting SLI if you have to cut off 2 PCI slots in the process, or at best restrict yourself to smaller PCI cards.

windsok · Post by **windsok** » Sat Sep 24, 2005 11:08 pm

Would there be any issues with some CPU coolers not fitting on this board? the heatpipes look to go pretty close to the cpu slot.

I would want to use something like a Zalman CNPS7700-AlCu with it.

rpsgc · Post by **rpsgc** » Sun Sep 25, 2005 12:58 am

windsok wrote:Would there be any issues with some CPU coolers not fitting on this board? the heatpipes look to go pretty close to the cpu slot.

I would want to use something like a Zalman CNPS7700-AlCu with it.

A8N-SLI Premium
A8N32-SLI

John Howard · Post by **John Howard** » Wed Sep 28, 2005 5:00 am

And a review is out

http://www.tweaktown.com/document.php?d ... ew&dId=813

I don't care about scores as much as I care about the heatsink and the 8-Phase Power.

toaom · Post by **toaom** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 3:13 am

John Howard wrote:...the 8-Phase Power.

The fact that it is more than 15% more efficient is pretty nice. It would probably make it easier to use passive CPU cooling as. (Normally the CPU cooler is used to cool the area around the CPU aswell)

Ryan Norton · Post by **Ryan Norton** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 11:19 am

Do we think the Scythe would fit on here? Those two HSes around the CPU bracket look like they might get in the way of the Scythe's heatpipes.

I really want to do away with my MSI Neo4 Platinum because there's just no good way to passive-ify the NF4 HS fan...

noac · Post by **noac** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 11:27 am

Ryan Norton wrote:Do we think the Scythe would fit on here? Those two HSes around the CPU bracket look like they might get in the way of the Scythe's heatpipes.

I really want to do away with my MSI Neo4 Platinum because there's just no good way to passive-ify the NF4 HS fan...

seems to fit perfectly on the a8n-sli premium. However the optional fans might be tricky.

http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewto ... c&start=60

frostedflakes · Post by **frostedflakes** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 8:54 pm

Man, that board is freaken sweet. Makes me kind of bummed I'm using Socket 754. All the cool new tech. is only available on S939.

capleton · Post by **capleton** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 11:24 pm

anybody have any ideas on whether or not it would cool the northbridge any better than the sli-premium?

noac · Post by **noac** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 11:35 pm

frostedflakes wrote:Man, that board is freaken sweet. Makes me kind of bummed I'm using Socket 754. All the cool new tech. is only available on S939.

Well If you didnt know Im about to make your day. For socket 775 the P5N32-SLi Deluxe will be released at the same time as the 939 a8n32-sli deluxe. And to be frank it looks even better than the 939 model.

http://uk.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l ... odelmenu=1

Btw, it's my next mobo.

toaom · Post by **toaom** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 11:56 pm

noac wrote:
frostedflakes wrote:Man, that board is freaken sweet. Makes me kind of bummed I'm using Socket 754. All the cool new tech. is only available on S939.
Well If you didnt know Im about to make your day. For socket 775 the P5N32-SLi Deluxe will be released at the same time as the 939 a8n32-sli deluxe. And to be frank it looks even better than the 939 model.

http://uk.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l ... odelmenu=1

Btw, it's my next mobo.

Socket 754 != Socket 775

noac · Post by **noac** » Fri Oct 14, 2005 10:53 am

toaom wrote:
noac wrote:
frostedflakes wrote:Man, that board is freaken sweet. Makes me kind of bummed I'm using Socket 754. All the cool new tech. is only available on S939.
Well If you didnt know Im about to make your day. For socket 775 the P5N32-SLi Deluxe will be released at the same time as the 939 a8n32-sli deluxe. And to be frank it looks even better than the 939 model.

http://uk.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l ... odelmenu=1

Btw, it's my next mobo.
Socket 754 != Socket 775

"All the cool new tech. is only available on S939." S939 != S775

Im very aware that he didn't have a 775 system. But he is not saying all the cool new tech is only avail on 939 and 775. He might be an intel-man and will be happy to see, if he didnt already know it, that the cool stuff also comes to 775 which isnt that far from 774 in comparision to 939.

But thanks for pointing that out - I need to be clearer.

frostedflakes · Post by **frostedflakes** » Fri Oct 14, 2005 9:55 pm

Hah, an Intel guy. Good one.

It's tempting to grab a good S939 board and an Athlon64 X2, but I'm holding out for Socket M2 and DDR2.