For the purposes of testing I gutted my XP installation prior to the mobo-swap and ran some tests. When it came time to run them on the new set-up, I made sure that Windows was loaded up with my usual assortment of programs and games. All those fresh OS installs may be great for the dedicated enthusiast site to show off the raw power of the newest gear, but gives an imprecise indication of how things might work in a real-world PC, one which gets used for more things than just testing memory-bus speed and MFLOPS.

3DMark 2003
Abit KR7A881
ASUS A7N8X991

Aquamark
KR7A11.33 FPS
A7N8X12.23 FPS

SimCity4
KR7AAvg. 15 FPS
A7N8XAvg. 25 FPS

SiSoft 2004
KR7AMIPS - 6326
MFLOPS - 2607
A7N8XMIPS - 6389
MFLOPS - 2611

Multimedia
KR7AInteger - 15187
FPU - 15440
A7N8XInteger - 15193
FPU - 15358

Memory Benchmark
KR7AInteger - 1831
FPU - 1710
A7N8XInteger - 1988
FPU - 1847

The test results proved to be a mixed bag. I wasn't expecting any great performance improvement from just replacing the motherboard, so I was surprised to see some of the changes that took place. The big jump in Mark was a pleasant surprise and the jump in frame rates for SimCity 4 are so good they're probably an anomaly. I was perturbed to see the multimedia benchmark return those poor results, but the numbers for the CPU and memory test are more reassuring.

What the numbers don't tell, however, is the pain free use of this mobo. My old motherboard, an Abit KR7A-RAID was a top class motherboard in its time, but the advancing years had shown up the lack of some of the new user-friendly advances which have been made to help keep things under the bonnet running smoothly. The included ASUS Probe and Update software are very handy. The first is the best mobo-monitoring tool I've seen and will keep you informed, for instance, of temperature and voltage fluctuations. The latter will make sure that you're BIOS is always up to date without having to fanny about with floppies and flashing. It's also very nice to have the LAN built in, ridding the user of many potential conflicts that NIC cards like to inflict, as well as keeping PCI slots free. The built in soundchip may cause a very slight processor performance hit but it's a good and cheap way of getting into surround sound while again keeping expansion options open.

Something that tests can't measure is the subjective feeling that humans experience, and in this case my new motherboard seems appreciably faster in everything it did. How much of this is down to hardware and how much to a person's desire to feel they are getting good value for money - reason is irrelevant if any importance is placed on the 'experience'.

All in all I was very impressed with the A7N8X. It may not be the most spanking motherboard out there, but for the majority of us gamers who either feel no need or the necessary weight in the wallet to keep up with the cutting-edge, it is the perfect platform on which to build a quality gaming system that may even live long enough to see the birth of Forever. Okay, okay, 2 then.

Available from Komplett for £83.

86%

By Sam Gibson