Final Words...

Performance wise, Asus?K8N takes the backseat to Abit’s KV8 Pro board, which comes as surprise. After all, the only difference between 250 and 250Gb chipsets should be the inclusion of certain features, but as the results depict, there is more to the two chipsets than merely a stack of features. Only in Aquamark and Unreal Tournament 2004 did the K8N surpassed KV8 Pro; in Aquamark the difference was a mere one percent and in Unreal Tournament 2004 the difference was around 1.5 percent, so the win was not even significant enough to make a distinction. Although K8N lost the battle against VIA’s K8T800 Pro board, the difference wasn’t all that immense in a few benchmarks. Therefore, the disparity between the two may not be as sizable as it seems in certain scenarios.

As far the layout is concerned, we are fairly impressed with what the board has to offer. The only thing that concerns is the location of the SATA ports, as it could potentially cause cabling issues in larger sized cases, but you can overcome the issues with a longer SATA cable if you are inclined towards a certain board.

The feature set of NVIDIA 250 chipset is commendable to say the least. The RAID options are far better than what VIA’s K8T800 Pro offers. The overclocking performance on the two chipsets was commonly same, thereby, making the choice even tougher than it already is.

It looks even the pricing isn’t going to help us narrow down between the two boards either. On Newegg.com, Abit’s KV8 Pro retails around $79.00 while Asus?K8N costs $85.00, a meager 6.4 percent price difference between the two. However, we have found Abit’s KV8 Pro around $73.00 and Asus?K8N around $65.00 at Pricewatch at lesser-known retailers.

From what we have seen in performance, layout, features, overclocking and pricing, it looks the K8N is a recommendable board. That being said, if you want the top most performance, VIA’s K8T800 Pro based KV8 Pro will do an excellent job, but if you want all the features you can get and are willing to negotiate a bit on performance, K8N is surely an open option.

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