Yesterday, we took a look at Asus’ economic K8N board, which is based on NVIDIA’s nForce3 250 chipset. The board layout was unique, to say the least. In fact, the new and innovative layout was introduced first on NVIDIA’s nForce3 boards. Regardless, we had the cabling issue complaint with Asus and others, but that can be resolved should you wish to purchase a board that is based on the nForce3 platform. In conclusion, we gave the Asus’ K8N our recommendation.

Today, we have its supposedly better version on our hands, and it would be an understatement if we say the board is better. For some reason, the 250Gb boards perform extremely well than their 250 predecessors. According to NVIDIA, the only difference between the two should just be the features, but as we apparently found out that wasn’t the case at all. Though this article primarily focuses on the features of K8N-E Deluxe over its K8N version, we suggest you look through our K8N evaluation to get an idea of how it performs.

The K8N-E Deluxe supports NVIDIA’s native hardware firewall and native Gigabit controller along with an additional integrated Silicon Image Sil 3114 SATA controller. NVIDIA’s 250 family of chipsets already support RAID 0, 1, 0+1 and JBOD configurations with two drives, and now with the Silicon Image disk controller, the board supports not only RAID 0, 1, 0+1 and JBOD but also RAID 5 for those who prefer this option. This makes the total supported SATA drives to a solid six, and this is all from onboard support.

Asus’ K8N-E Deluxe also supports two IEEE/1394 ports via VIA’s VT6307 controller and of course, Asus’ popular overclocking features and onboard features are pretty much similar to its K8N forerunner.

Generally, the performance of the K8N-E Deluxe is excellent and quite competent against MSI’s K8N Neo Platinum, also an nForce3 250Gb offering. Although the battle is tied more or less between the two boards for the top spot, Asus comes as a winner in almost all cases. That being said, the difference between the two boards is not much to declare a definite winner, even though Asus does manage to take majority of the top spots. In real application scenarios, the apparent performance variation will be next to none.

Asus’ K8N-E Deluxe board retails around $125.00 at Newegg.com while MSI’s K8N Neo Platinum costs approximately $101.00, which is a 24 percent price difference between the two. And considering that both boards support pretty much the same features, the K8N-E Deluxe leans on a more expensive side. All in all, it looks like Asus has a great offering on their hand and the board is definitely recommendable, but MSI has better value overall.

Once again, we recommend that you read our K8N evaluation to see how the K8N-E Deluxe performs in relation to its competition and other socket 754 boards.

 Looking for more motherboards, check out Newegg.com for more choices.