A few months ago we looked at the Asus SK8V motherboard, it was the first socket 940 board we had used and at the time we were completely happy with it. As far as motherboards go, it was feature packed and completely stable. You really couldn’t ask for much more. The Socket 940 market is relatively small and where some companies such as Abit have decided to skip production of such boards ASUS made the decision to introduce several. The SK8V we reviewed previously is based on a VIA chipset the SK8N is based on the N-force 3 Pro 150 chipset. We shall take a look today at how it performs with 2 of AMD’s most recent processors, the FX51 and FX53.

The SK8N features the standard 1 AGP 8x and 5 PCI slots and officially supports DDR 200,266,333 however since the above specifications were published ASUS have also added support for DDR400. Other importaint features are 6 USB ports (4 onboard), onboard LAN and Firewire ports, 2 x Serial ATA Raid (RAID0, RAID1, RAID 0+1) and Asus features such as ASUS MyLogo2, ASUS EZ Flash and ASUS CrashFree2 BIOS. The board really provides all the features necessary for building a performance system.

The board layout is quite different to the SK8V, the SK8N features a CPU socket much closer to the centre of the board and memory slots which run parallel to the top of the board. This layout does make working in the case slightly easier as the CPU and memory are further away from drives and cables than normal. Cooling of the ram may also be assisted depending on the cooling of your case or PSU. All IDE, SATA and power sockets are placed down the edge of the board which allows for greater air flow through the rest of the system where it is needed. The final design point of note is the PCB space to the side of the PCI slots is free from components and traces, something that is rather useful as capacitors in that area makes the addition and removal of PCI cards more difficult.

Test System:
Amd Athlon 64 FX-51
Amd Athlon 64 FX-53 ASUS SK8N
2x512mb DDR333 supplied and thanks to Crucial.com/uk
2x512mb DDR400 Supplied and thanks to Corsairmicro.com
AMD Stock CPU cooler
Nvidia Geforce FX 5900 XT 128mb
IBM Deskstar 120 GXP 40GB 7200rpm Hard Drive
Sony CRX300E DVD/CDRW
Sony Floppy Drive
Mercury 400W PSU
AOC 19” 9GLR CRT

Software:
Windows SP1a
Direct X 9.0b
Detonator 53.03 WHQL
Nforce Driver 3.13
Nbench 3
Aquamark 3
Unreal Tournament 2003 (build 2225)
PC Mark 2002
PC Mark 04 (build 100)
Sisoft Sandra (build 989)
Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne (patch 1.01)
Colin McRae Rally 04 – Demo

The test system was built from scratch, a format of the hard drive was performed (NTFS) and then Windows XP was installed. Following the completion of the install the N-force drivers were installed. The only updates applied were SP1a and Direct X 9.0b. Following a reboot the Detonator 53.03 drivers were installed. Next the benchmarking tools were installed and finally the hard drive was de-fragmented. For all tests the Nvidia drivers were set to best image quality.

Good Benchmarking Practice:
Each benchmark was performed 3 times and the middle result for each resolution/setting is shown in the tables which follow. After changing any Anti-Aliasing (AA) or Anisotropic Filtering (AF) setting and before a benchmark was run the system was rebooted. All games/applications had their latest patches applied.

The bios:

Next: Pcmark02

 

Select 1. Intro 2. Pcmark02 3. nbench3 4. Aquamark3 5. UT2003 6. Pcmark04 7. Max Payne 2 8. Photoshop 9. Colin McRae 4 10. Overclocking 11. Conclusion