Marc Perkel Rantz

ASUS A8N-SLI Motherboard - Not what I expected

I tried posting this on NewEgg's review forum and it censored me. Apparently it doesn't let you post honest reviews, so I'm posting it here.

I was very disapointed with this product. maybe it's the state of the technology but I had expectations this board would actually work. BEWARE - As of right now 09/04/2005 there are no ram combinations listed that will get you to 4 gigs of ram. I need 4 gigs and struggling to find a solution. I AM NOT HAPPY!!!

I first ordered it with Rosewill ram figuring that if the system needs DDR-400 that it will take DDR-400 memory. Silly me. I don't yet know if the memory is bad or just incompatible.

Then I went to Fry's and bought some high powered Kingston KHX3200/1GR gamer's memory and it does seem to work, sort of. That is - works with 2 gigs installed. There seems to be issues with 4 gigs that I have yet to resolve. Running Fedora Core 4 Linux 64 bit version.

The CPU - Athlon 4400+ X2 dual core and memory access speeds are lower that my Pentium 2.8 ghz extreme edition. L2 cache data transfer rate is 1/4th that of the P4 and main memory bandwidth is 1/4 of the 6.4 GHZ that AMD advertizes.

When you buy a 64 bit CPU you expect it to be able to at least address 4 gigs of ram. If this were a 32 bit processor I could understan that this would be an issue.

Bottom line is - I spent $1000 on memory alone and I don't see light at the end of the tunnel.

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UPDATE - I did get this working. I got the Kingstom ram to work by recompiling the Kernel. Actually I unstalled the 2.6.13 kernel and I don't know if it was different options or if they fixed something in the new kernel - but - it's working and it's fast. So I am now happy.

Apparently this is more bleading edge than I thought. Probably 6 months from now it will be more mainstream and stable. This 4 gig barrier reminds me of the old 640k PC days with upper memory and the 1 meg barrier. It is similar in that as of now certian things need to live below the 4 gig line so if you have 4 gigs you have to remap ram to open up a hole for PCI stuff, roms, and video ram. That means you have to move memory and when you do - the operating system has to understand that. Fortunately Linux does. If you're running Windows - lots of luck! It's going to be a while before Windows deals with the 4 gig barrier.

So - this sucker seems to be seriously fast. Comparing it to benchmarks posted on Webhostingtalk it is running at around the same speed as 2 AMD Opterons. It's going to be interesting to see how it runs as my new server.

Posted by marc at September 4, 2005 09:24 AM