The K8N-DL is Asus' first foray into the world of dual Opterons, and the board is bound to make a splash. Although it's easily the least expensive entry in this comparison, the K8N-DL doesn't once come across as cheap. It does come across as a little odd, though, at least at first glance. We can probably blame the board's unusual L-shaped layout for that.

Even at its widest point, the K8N-DL is a couple of inches narrower than the Iwill and Tyan boards. It's still larger than a standard ATX platform, but you won't necessarily need an Extended ATX enclosure to accommodate the L-shaped board.

Considering the limited board real estate, it's no surprise that the K8N-DL's layout is a little cramped. Still, Asus has managed to locate power connectors along the edges of the board where they won't interfere with air flow around the CPU sockets. As with all of the boards in this comparison, you'll want to drive this board with a workstation-class power supply unit with 24-pin primary and 8-pin secondary power connectors.

The K8N-DL is the only board in this comparison to align its CPU sockets across the width of the board. That doesn't leave much clearance for larger CPU coolers, although both sockets should at least be close to a case's rear exhaust fan.

Note that unlike the Iwill and Tyan boards, the K8N-DL only sports six DIMM slots—four off the first CPU, and two off the second. With DIMMs hanging off each CPU socket, the Opteron's Non-Uniform Memory Architecture (NUMA) is fully supported, albeit with two fewer DIMMs than the other boards we're looking at.

Clearances are pretty tight between the K8N-DL's CPU sockets and expansion slots. Asus barely squeezes a low-profile chipset cooler between the PCI Express x16 and DIMM slots, and it's an active design with a whiny little fan. With tiny chipset fans more prone to failure, we'd prefer to see a larger, passive chipset cooler. Unfortunately, such a cooler would impede clearance for longer graphic cards. Users with shorter graphics cards that don't stretch far beyond the edge of the x16 slot should be able to swap in a taller passive cooler on their own.

The K8N-DL may be the only board in this comparison with a single PCI Express x16 slot, but it's also the only one with a dedicated x1 slot—not that there are many PCI Express x1 peripherals available at the moment. For peripherals that are widely available, the board also has a pair of standard PCI slots. However, a lack of PCI-X slots severely hinders the K8N-DL's ability to support high-performance SCSI devices, which could hurt its chances in the workstation world.

Then again, with eight Serial ATA RAID ports onboard, workstation users might not need SCSI after all. Keep in mind that four of the board's Serial ATA ports are bound to a Silicon Image controller whose performance may be constrained by PCI bus bandwidth, though.

Around the rear, the K8N-DL's port cluster is just as crowded as the rest of the board. In this case, that's a good thing, since the port cluster has a little something for everyone. The K8N-DL's array of audio outputs, which includes six analog ports and both RCA and TOS-Link digital outputs, is particularly impressive.