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Let's get this out of the way quickly!

Our benchmark system for the standard set of motherboard tests was as follows:

• AMD Athlon 64 3700+ (2.2 GHz, Socket 939) processor
• 2*512 MB OCZ PC4800 Platinum Edition memory
• Western Digital WD1200JD SATA hard drive (system/benchmark drive)
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 120 GB (SATA testing)
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80 GB (IDE/USB 2.0 testing)
• BFG GeForce 7800 GTX OC 256 MB PCI-Express video card
• OCZ ModStream 520W power supply

The competitor for our ASUS A8N32-SLI is the DFI Lanparty nF4 SLI-DR -- a mature, proven, and established motherboard that is rock-solid and consistently puts out very impressive performance numbers. The ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe is up for a tough challenge, but going by what I have seen so far, I feel confident that it will not leave us hanging.

Our benchmark system for the SLI testing was identical, with the exception of the CPU and memory timings. For our standard motherboard testing, the Athlon 64 3700+ was used at stock (200 MHz HT, 11x mult., 2200 MHz) settings, while the RAM was being pushed at 2.5-3-3-8 1T timings. Our SLI testing was done with the same processor, but at overclocked (300 MHz HT, 9x mult., 2700 MHz) settings, while the RAM had to be loosened to 2.5-4-4-10 2T timings.

A list of benchmarks performed follows:

• Business Winstone 2004
• Multimedia Content Creation 2004
• SiSoft Sandra (memory)
• WinRAR
• HDTach
• TMPGEnc MPEG2 Encoding
• XviD Encoding
• LAME MP3
• Rightmark Audio
• Call of Duty
• Doom 3
• Comanche 4
• Halo
• Jedi Knight 2
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• Half-Life 2*
• Serious Sam 2*
• F.E.A.R.*
• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory*

* denotes SLI testing

Drivers used were ForceWare version 81.98, nForce4 AMD/Intel x16 version 6.85 (for ASUS A8N32-SLI), and nForce4 AMD version 6.70 (for DFI Lanparty nF4 SLI-DR).

That's it, enough stalling. It's time for some pretty graphs!