Socket 939: Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe / Asus A8N-SLI Premium

CyCLoBoT · #1 06-10-2008, 03:28 AM

Hey guys, I am thinking about purchasing the Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard and was wondering if it works well with Leopard? I checked the HCL on osx86 site and the one here and this motherboard is not mentioned anywhere. If anyone is using this board, please do tell if its working fine with Leopard or not.

naquaada · #2 06-10-2008, 10:57 AM

I have this board, it woks without problems with Leo4All V3 and the 10.5.3 Update, using an Athlon 64 3700+. At installation use the old nForce chipset driver and the forcedeth-v network driver. skge.kext ist not neccessary, it doesn't support the 2nd Marvell network connector. If you want to update to 10.5.3 with Zephyroth's Updater, backup the 10.5.2 kexts because mostly graphic cards won't work with the 10.5.3 drivers.

BTW: If you don't have the board yet, I wouldn't recommend it. It has a 9 seconds boot pause every time and the overclocking features are rather bad. If you want to have a real good Socket 939 board, buy the Asus A8N-SLI Premium. This board is also fully compatible, to OS X, I installed a 10.5.3 system on the Premium and ported it to the A8N-32SLI and this worked. Try to get board revision 1.04G, it can be better overclocked than the older version 1.02. If you need a smaller board, try the Asus A8N-E FM/S. It's a well-equipped microATX board with 2x IDE, 4x SATA2, 6x USB 2.0, 2x Firewire, PCI-E 16x and 3x PCI. It's the only nForce 4 microATX-board what I found (at least from Asus). The LAN chip is the Realtek 8201CL from which many people say it doesn't work, but it's fully working here.

naquaada · #3 06-10-2008, 05:24 PM

I'm also no big overclocking fan, but I tested it and it works fine with the Premium board. With good overclocking options you can f.e. lower your CPU voltage, this means the processor won't create so much heat - even if you don't overclock it. The boot pause is as following: Normal prodedure after power on is beeping, little memory test, detecting hardware, showing components as usual. But then you have a boot pause from 9...0 with the message 'Press Esc to continue booting' which is fully unneccessary and I never saw on another board ever.
Another thing is the bad positioning of the 2 PCI-E slots. In the A8N32-SLI the slots are set in this order: PCI, PCI-E x16, PCI, PCI, PCI-E x16, PCI-E x4

On the Asus A8N-SLI Premium it's PCI, PCI, PCI, PCI-E x16, PCI-E x8, PCI-E x1, PCI-E x16

The most gfx card need two Slots at the back side (especially if they are passive), so you'll always lose one PCI-slot on the A8N-32SLI, if you use two you lose two. On the Premium you don't lose a PCI slot, only a PCI-E x1 slot. Oly by use of 2 gfx cards you'll use one slot. On the Premium is the Airflow better using 2 cards because they are not so tight together. The only difference - The Premium board reduces in SLI mode (with 2 nvidia SLI-compatible gfx cards) the PCI-E bus with of PCI-E 16x to PCI-E 8x, so it's PCI-E 16x in total. The A8N-32SLI Deluxe provides full PCI-E 32x in SLI mode. But I don't know if you need this. MacOS doesn't support SLI.

I always would recommend the premium board, I got the Deluxe as a gift to my Opteron 185 processor. I have three, a friend has also two or three, two other friends have each one, and another friend also has one and a cheaper variant of it, the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe (without heatpipe and some other differences).

CyCLoBoT · #4 06-20-2008, 06:46 PM

Does it matter if the board revision is either 1.02 or 1.04G? I mean in terms of compatibility with Leopard, it should work just fine right? Cause I have bought the motherboard (A8N-SLI Premium) off eBay and not sure what revision it would be.

naquaada · #5 06-20-2008, 06:58 PM

No, both work, but the 1.04G is better to overclock. But the 1.02 seems to work with noname RAM which the 1.04G doesn't like so much. I recommend always 2 RAM modules of the same speed and size to get Dual-Channel RAM. The max RAM you can use is 3GB, when using 4GB Toast crashes unless you use a reduction settiing in BIOS. I can mail you the actual BIOS version, it's very easy to upgrade: just insert the CD and hold Alt-F2 during startup.

EDIT: This problem is solved due to slashacks improved nForce drivers with 4 GB support.

CyCLoBoT · #6 06-20-2008, 07:25 PM

Yeah sure that would be great. Do you need my email or what?

coreyinoz · #7 07-03-2008, 07:31 PM

naquaada,

How exactly did you get the nForce LAN port to work without the dreaded freezing issue? I've tried disabling IPv6. I've tried both forcedeth and forcedeth-v, with a variety of kernels under Leo4allv3. I've also tried Zephyroth rev 2, and no success their either. As an aside, I can use the Marvell port, but it's achingly slow.

The nForce port works for 10 seconds or so but maxes out my internet connection, but Marvell maxes out at about 10kb/s when it should be closer to 400!

Any advice?

If I can get LAN working, I just have a nagging video issue (blue screen for 10 mins at boot) and I'll be sorted...

Athlon X2 4200+
Asus A8N32-SLI
BenQ IDE DVD-RW
Maxtor SATA 320GB
Asus HD 3650 512MB (QE/SI enabled, but takes 10-15 mins to boot after I install video drivers)

naquaada · #8 07-03-2008, 08:15 PM

I attached the driver I'm using, including some installation instructions. Watch out, it's no rar archive, it's a zip. I can't upload zip files because of some unknown reason.

With the orgininal forcedeth driver I always got a kernel panic when transferring large files via network. This driver hasn't this problem. Internet worked with both drivers without problems.

For the gfx card I have no idea, my Radeon X1600Pro works fine. You can try to remove all unneccessary extensions from ATI*, GeForce* and NV*, start with the GeForce ad NV* drivers. But don't delete them, backup them somewehere, also the old forcedeth driver. Install Onyx and clean your system with it, it can help.

coreyinoz · #9 07-03-2008, 09:01 PM

Thanks so much!

I'm going to try this and will report back.

Onyx looks very similar to pcwiz's OSX86 Tools Utility. I just read about it today, and haven't tried either yet, but I will try to remove unnecessary extensions as you say.

http://pcwizcomputer.com/osx86tools/

Thanks again.

coreyinoz

naquaada · #10 07-03-2008, 09:45 PM

The OSx86 Tools Utility is different to Onyx. I personally would not use this tool, I have a bad feeling with it.