ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe - Bundle, Presentation and Manuals
Presentation
The presentation for the A8N-SLI mirrors that of the company's other high-end mainboard products. A black and white main themed box hides a huge amount of extra bits and pieces.
The box makes sure you know what you're buying, with the main features emblazoned for all to see, the 'ai' box art hinting at the A.I. overclocking features inside, ASUS positioning the board squarely at the feet of the enthusiast. Does it make you feel like you're getting value for your money? I'll leave that decision up to you.
Bundle
The bundle for ASUS's Deluxe mainboards is always plentiful. For eight SATA ports, you need eight SATA data cables and provision to power eight drives via the native SATA power connectors. ASUS give you the data cables at least. The manual makes note that the power cables should be provided though, in the form of four Molex-to-dual-SATA splitters. Look out for those in your retail box.
You also get extras in the form of an external SATA module, for running SATA disks outside of your case, all the extra ports for things like USB2.0 (4 extra ports), FireWire (one port), the SLI inter-GPU connector, a game port (on one of the USB2.0 port brackets) and solitary PATA and floppy ribbons.
Manual and CDs
The manual is a usual ASUS high point. It's easy to read, navigate and extract useful informations from. You also get a cool Quick Start guide for getting the board up and running quickly and for future reference. The driver CD has a simple interface, auto-detects the hardware to offer you the right drivers for install and has a decent range of extras and tools, including one for the A.I. N.O.S overclocking feature in the BIOS. More on that soon.
You're also reminded you've got an SLI-able board, with a cutout of a GeForce 6800 Ultra. I'll maybe sell that on Ebay as an actual board, a la the XBox box scammers. Only joking.
As always, all the extras in the world, bundled bits and bobs, on board features, good layouts and on-paper promise can all be smashed to smithereens (always wanted to use that word in an article, woo!) with a rubbish BIOS. Therein lies one of the A8N-SLI's original failings. Let's check out the interface and options. The following page is very image heavy (273KB or so, just for the thumbnails), for those on dialup.
