Update April 30th 2005: Going strong! Upgraded to an Athlon XP2800 cooled by a neat looking Zalman CNPS7000B-ALCU (39° with Arctic Silver 5 and quiet too even cranked to full fan speed). Added a 16X Pioneer DVR-109 BK DVD Burner.
Update March 27th 2004: This motherboard has been a rock-solid performer. Added a 4x LiteOn DVD burner.
Update October 19th 2003: Upgraded to a 120GB SATA drive and another stick of Corsair PC3200 400Mhz Cas2 RAM for dual channel support. All's working flawlessly.
November 27th 2002
The Asus A7N8X Deluxe just came out, with the new nForce2 chipset that features ATA133, dual LAN ports, Dolby Digital surround sound, 2 Serial ATA ports with Raid 0/1 support via a Silicon Image 3112A chip, 6 USB 2.0 ports, 5 PCI 2.2 slots, a 4Mb Award BIOS, and dual-channel DDR400 RAM support. Amongst many other bells and whistles such as verbally explaining boot / POST problems to you via the onboard Winbond speech chip and a speaker. Sold!
Other parts for the computer are an Antec SLK3700AMB case, Leadtek Winfast A280LETD GeForce4 Ti4200 with 8X/Pro AGP, Vivo, and 128Mb RAM, an Athlon XP 2100+ processor, Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 6Y080L0 80GB ATA/133 7200RPM Hard Drive w/Fluid Dynamic Bearing Motors, and a 512Mb stick of Corsair PC3200 400Mhz Cas2 RAM.
- (1) Floppy drive cable
- (1) UltraDMA 33 cable for CD's
- (1) UltraDMA 133 cable for HDD's
- (2) Serial ATA cables
- (1) 2 port 1394 bracket with 2 cables
- (1) Game port / 2 USB port combo bracket with cables
- (1) Com port bracket
- (1) I/O shield
- Users manual
- A quick setup guide
- A large nifty case sticker with the major components labeled and jumper settings pictured
- A quick reference card with case wire connections pictured
- Installation CD with
- Drivers
- Acrobat
- Asus Updater for BIOS update checking
- 3Deep for color correction in games
- BIOS flashing utility
- DirectX 8.1
- Pccillin 2002 antivirus
- Probe hardware monitoring utility
- Winbond Voice Editor for editing vocal POST messages
- nForce Control Panel software
- A screensaver
- And a aluminum Asus sticker
If it seems overly difficult to get cards in their slots, find out where the interference is. Line cards up in their slot and slightly wiggle fore and aft while pushing the card straight in. Make sure the card stays 90 degrees to the motherboard.
Keep your fingers off any contacts and don't let sweat drip onto anything. Be careful about dropping tools onto the motherboard when the case is laying on its side.
Replace the I/O shield with the Asus one if it is different. This will be most likely. The case I'm using is a Antec SLK3700AMB with the shield held in place by 2 screws. The Asus shield is friction fit and fits snugly.
The guide stamped into this particular case labels all mounting holes for the different board types. Several standoffs are pre installed with the center one being a stud with thumb nut. I used this to hold the board in place while installing the screws. What ever case you use, use all the mounts that you can.
Check carefully after mounting the motherboard standoffs, I had to remove one that was by the rear edge in the middle of the PCI slot area since there was no corresponding hole in the board. If the standoffs are metal they could short the motherboard out. Any type could bend the board. The 9 remaining screws I used hold the motherboard securely in place, but I use reasonable care installing a PCI card. With this mobo that was only one, a Winfast TV card. Hardly a neccessary item. For the average user an AGP card is the only thing needed.
- Slip the board into the case and position it over the standoffs. Be aware of any studs and don't scratch the back of the motherboard.
- Line up the I/O ports on the shield and motherboard. Make sure the shield contacts by the mouse port, the 3Com RJ45 LAN port, and the lower nVidia RJ45 LAN port are on top of the port housings and not sticking into them.
- Push the motherboard against the spring pressure of the various shield contacts until you can slip the board over the center stud (if applicable) or install a screw. Check at the back of the case that the ports are lined up with the shield.
- Check that the board is flat against the standoffs. If it's not find out why before screwing it down.
- Loosely install the right screws. Don't use the serrated board chewing screws and check carefully since there's likely to be two similar choices that differ in thread. Of the 4 types of screws my case came with, the right ones had a slightly larger diameter and coarser thread than the similar screws for the drives.
- When all looks good push the board against the I/O pressure and tighten a few screws moderately.
- Check PCI card fit and adjust the motherboard so that the PCI card screw hole lines up with the case mounting hole.
- Finish moderately tightening the motherboard screws and do a final check of the fit.
After a careful check of all the connections to the motherboard, it was time to power up. I used a PS/2 mouse and keyboard for the initial install.
No beep, no video signal. Doh! The fans were spinning at least. Resetting the CMOS allowed me to boot once. To boot again I had to clear the CMOS again.
A trip to Asus's Forum led me to a post by olddoc at The House Of Help. It turned out the Corsair Cas2 PC3200 RAM was causing trouble. Here's olddocs BIOS settings that worked for me, be sure to check for recent news:
Aggressive cpu.
Memory freq by SPD (reports 200mhz. The bios help suggests sync for fastest, but then it reports 166mhz -- I have an Athlon 2800)
SDRAM Active Precharge Delay 7
SDRAM Ras to Cas delay 3
Ras precharge delay 3
Cas latency 2T (2.5T for AMD based)
DDR voltage 2.6
Thanks olddoc!
My parameters for installation were Windows 2000 without ACPI, and no serial ports needed.
Some BIOS settings I used were:
- Advanced BIOS Features
- First Boot Device: CDROM (change back to floppy after the operating system install)
- Integrated Peripherals
- Primary VGA BIOS set to AGP
- Enable USB Legacy Support
- Enable USB Mouse Support
- Disable Onboard Serial Port 1
- Disable Onboard Serial Port 2
- PnP/PCI Configuration
- Resources Controlled By [Auto(ESCD)] (for a ACPI-less installation use [Manual], not recommended)
After saving the BIOS settings the computer reboots and asks if you want to boot from the CD. I chose Yes.
Windows 2000 then checks out the hardware in the system. A message at the bottom of the screen says to press F6 to load SCSI or SATA drivers. Pressing F5 instead allows you to choose to install as a ACPI-less Standard Computer. For most installations don't press any keys and let the installation continue. If you did choose to bypass ACPI, the computer will reboot. Don't choose "Boot From CD" again.
The rest of the Windows 2000 installation went smoothly. The only glitch was a audio warning message when installing the nForce drivers. But it works fine in spite of that.
Good Luck and if you bought this board I hope this page was of some help,
Jeff Davidson
www.FlashingTheNet.com