Entrants (cont’d)

ASUS

As the world’s largest motherboard manufacturer, ASUS is a company that’s probably familiar to most, if not all of you. At last year’s invitational event, ASUS’ focus was mobility – they brought two gaming notebooks with them to demonstrate that gaming on the go with one of their notebooks wasn’t just feasible, it was actually quite enjoyable. Their L5GA sported ATI’s latest graphics chip at the time, MOBILITY 9700, while the second notebook they brought along, the W1, sported a 15.4” widescreen display. For this year’s event ASUS went in the complete opposite direction, bringing top-of-the-line high-end PCs.

ASUS had a great showing at this year’s event and brought two completely decked out PC’s, both featuring the new ASUS Vento 3600 case, with one system being Intel based, while the other was AMD based. The AMD based system was used in our testing, and featured AMD’s fastest gaming CPU, the AMD Athlon 64 FX-55.

ASUS partnered with Corsair and had 1GB of Corsair XMS DDR PC3200XL memory in the their system. The new ASUS A8N SLI Premium motherboard, based on the nForce 4 SLI chipset, was used in the rig.

The A8N SLI Premium is ASUS’ replacement for the A8N-SLI Deluxe. It features heatpipe cooling on the North Bridge of the chipset, with ASUS’ AI Selector Electronic Quick Switch technology, so you won’t have to use an SLI connector to switch from single GPU to SLI mode. The A8N SLI Premium runs completely silent, there are no fans on the motherboard itself. ASUS also claims that the board features enhanced FSB overclocking.

To demonstrate this, ASUS chose to overclock their system, overclocking their Athlon 64 FX-55 CPU from 2.6GHz to 2.73GHz. For the PC’s graphics, ASUS used two ASUS Extreme N6800U GeForce 6800 Ultra graphics cards running in SLI mode.

DFI

DFI’s really been going out of their way to entice gamers and hardware enthusiasts. Their LANPARTY series of motherboards were the first to ship with round IDE cables, and also include other goodies such as customizable FRONTX 5.25” front panel bays and a convenient strap for carrying your PC to LAN parties. Not only do these motherboards come with lots of extra features, but they also provide great performance and reliability, with competitive pricing.

For nForce4 Ultra/nForce4 SLI, DFI partnered with memory manufacturer OCZ Technology to produce a line of complementary motherboards and memory modules that are specifically designed for overclockers and hardware enthusiasts. As we outlined in our nForce4 SLI roundup, DFI’s nF4 SLI-DR provides memory voltage adjustment up to a whopping 4V, while OCZ’s VX memory modules are rated for operation at up to 3.5V with tight timings. As a result, we were able to overclock the front-side bus on our DFI board for that article up to 270MHz!

DFI had a great system at last year’s event, and this year it was no different. The company was running their DFI LANPARTY UT nForce4 Ultra motherboard, with an overclocked, air-cooled, AMD Athlon 64 3000+ running at 2.25GHz (up from 1.8GHz stock). The most impressive part of this was the cooler chosen: DFI’s board was running on the stock AMD aluminum CPU cooler you get when you purchase the retail-boxed Athlon 64!

DFI’s submission also featured 1GB of DDR 400 memory and a GeForce 6800GT graphics card.