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The ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe has lived up to my expectations, and surpassed them in a few cases. ASUS should be commended on a job well done as far as motherboards go. The board was not only rock-solid during testing (with the exception of stability problems on a certain day caused by dirty power in our lab), but actually managed to keep our old favourite, the DFI Lanparty nF4 SLI-DR, in close sights the entire time.

Features-wise, the board is packed with expansion and storage capabilities. To further distance it from run-of-the-mill nForce4 motherboards, ASUS even implemented a very creative single-heatpipe passive cooling solution -- a most welcome addition for any silent-PC freaks. "Alright", you say. "The board is neat, it's fast, and it's stable ... so what's wrong with it?"

What's wrong with the ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe is the fact that its main selling feature is really just a marketing gimmick. That's not to say its dual 16-lane SLI capabilities are entirely useless, because we never know what kind of bandwidth requirements future video cards/games will have, but at this point in time, all it is is a marketing gimmick that earns you some bragging rights. In our testing, it was revealed that true 16-lane SLI did not improve performance one bit.

In fact, we expected as much, seeing as how NVIDIA stated this themselves when SLI was first launched. They explained that reducing the lane width to both cards to only 8 lanes would have a non-existant to very minimal impact on performance. NVIDIA was absolutely correct about that, yet they've still released the nForce4 SLI x16 chipset. Extravagant? Definitely -- but that stops no one.

All in all, I'm very pleased with the ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe. Whether or not bragging rights are important to you, this motherboard still has things to offer to any potential SLI user. If it's any consolation to those who were expecting magnificent gains in performance from this motherboard's SLI-on-steroids capabilities -- you still get RAID 5, which is something those boring, old regular nForce4 SLI users don't have.

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