Buying a new computer

[UncasMS]

i never intended to make use of the sli function and nevertheless i bought the asus a8n-sli as i liked the board for all it was worth

[Chewy]

was it the nf4 chipset over via?

[UncasMS]

nf4

[Chewy]

I am still trying to figure out nf2

[toomanycats]

I went from a ATI 9800SE to a X800 256 AGP Pro, the refurbished one from ATI.com. I couldn't be happier. By the way TigerDirect.com is selling a Barebones AsusK8vse deluxe with AMD AAthlon 64 3700 cpu fan, Case, I gig of PC3200 DDR ram, power supply, keyboard and mouse for $399.

[Chewy]

The mobo and cpu and possibily the ram will be good, but the newsgroups
are full of people whose tigerdirect power supplies crapped out on them.

[mill]

nf2 -nf4 ? Now im lost

[Chewy]

motherboard chipsets

[UncasMS]

nf => nforce

[mill]

That helps, thanks its all starting to come together nowPS UncasMS ,are you pleased with the motherboard?

[UncasMS]

i most definitely AM

though i had to exchange the former chipset fan - it was a noisy little sucker with ~8.000rpm and a plain desaster for a mainboard of this price-range

asus send me a new one as they did with many other angry customers and i doubt that the boards you buy nowadays still have this crappy fan - i bet they have exchanged it for a slightly bigger one with much less rpm

the one i got send from asus only has ~5.000rpm, is bigger in its diameter, cools better and is way more quiet

so i think you wont have to worry with this aspect

the other thing was the nvidia nforce driver

it took me a while to find out that installing the entire nforce driverpack was responsible for SEVERE trouble - in particular the ethernet driver components!

be careful and maybe stay away from installing the ethernet drivers - my internet connection always broke down after a couple of time and NOT using these drivers solved my connectivity problem

[mill]

Thanks for the heads up on those things, as far as i no Monarch is going to install all the drivers, my system is being built by them as we speak. Im keeping my fingers crossed.

[anonymez]

IMO chipset fans are not needed (and yes, i too had the displeasure of getting a horribly noisy and malfunctioning chipset fan, courtesy of asus), get a heatsink, they're cheap, silent and will do the job

[UncasMS]

get a heatsink, they're cheap, silent and will do the job

no, they definitely wont do the job on this board

only the zalman will be sufficient but why spend much money on that heatsink, when i can get a new fan from asus for nothing?

[anonymez]

i don't put much faith in asus chipset fans anymore, they spin too fast and loud from my experience, especially the A8V-E Deluxe. also asus support is horrible here in aus, i tried many many places to find a local number, and still nothing, except the laptop service center, which didn't help. thier au website sucks too, its no different from the US. other than that, the boards are great