With PCI Express and DDR2 memory support for AMD chips a little way off, it's been left to Via and nVidia to provide the best support for these processors with the KT800 and nForce3 respectively. The K8N-E Deluxe from Asus is the latest motherboard we've seen to use nVidia's nForce3 250Gb chipset.

Designed for Athlon 64, the Deluxe is built around a 754pin socket. It's a tidy board with plenty of room around all the major components; in fact, it's so well laid out that you may not notice how feature-rich it is.

The 250Gb chipset offers an 800MHz system bus, two Serial ATA (Sata) connectors, support for up to eight USB2 ports and a dedicated channel for Gigabit Ethernet, controlled by a Marvell chip.

There are a further four Sata ports, controlled by a Silicon Image chip, integrated 7.1 audio via Realtek's ALC850 chip and a Firewire port. Three Dimm slots support up to 3GB of PC3200, PC2700, PC2100 or PC1600 DDR memory.

The two nForce3 Sata ports can be set up in a Raid array with Raid 0, 1, 0+1, or as a Jbod (just a bunch of disks). The other four may be configured into Raid 0, 1, 10, 5 or Jbod arrays.

The board has two ATA 133 connectors, which, with the main ATX power connector, are mounted near the right-hand edge of the board.

As with all high-end Asus boards, the K8N-E Deluxe comes with all the cables, manuals and Asus software utilities.

Contact: Asus http://uk.asus.com

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