ASUS K8V Deluxe came later than most other offerings from other manufacturers. From the specifications, you could not missed the feature of Wi-Fi connectivity and how you could turn the machine into an access point serving your other home PCs and PDAs with WIFI compliant SD/CF cards. This would definitely save you a bit of money (do take note the WiFi modules comes as optional). Other standard features on this board include USB 2.0, 1394, Gigabit Ethernet, 6 channel audio, USB, 1394 and overclocking features. It also comes with the an additional ATA133 channel for 2 HDDs and 4 SATA RAID ports (2 by VIA, 2 by Promise).

The boards performance is pretty good and is in line with most of the VIA K8T800 chipset mainboard. It has a similar performance level to the Gigabyte equivalent and excels well in the Aquamark 3 benchmark. Despite a newer south bridge 8237, the IDE performance is needs some catching up to do with the SiS or ALi Ref Boards. In fact, I feel that the performance levels could still be tuned for better performance. We also noticed that this board seems to have used a newer BIOS patch as the memory benchmarks dropped to 3010 or so. This could have resulted in a slightly lower score which does not bother me too much.

Installation of this board is straightforward. The only confusion might appear when you try to play with the Wi-Fi and configuring it as a Software AP. In our tests, we get 100% signal level connecting through the Wi-Fi module to our Gigabyte wireless router and it works like a charm.

In terms of overclocking, we managed to bring the CPU up to 222MHz FSB at default voltage, DDR 2.7v at CAS 2.5, 6-3-3 (8-4-4). Although we can POST at 225Mhz, it hung in Quake 3 test and remained unstable at that speed. One thing we note is that the board does not seem to support FIX PCI/AGP=33/66. MAXMEMCLK setting is available on most K8T800 boards which allows MEM to run ASYNC to CPU FSB but it doesn't seem to help in overclocking by a lot when setting it to operate in async mode. We also find that the voltage ranges are quite restrictive and it could be expanded.

This is a nice board to own if you intend to go wireless in the near future. It has all the necessary things for your expansion in the near future. Recommended!

Suggested Retail : ~ USD138 Online Pricing

Discuss & read more

Pros 好处:

• 6 Channel audio
• USB 2.0 
• Gigabit LAN
• 1394
• 4 SATA ports with RAID
• 1 addition ATA133 port
• Wi-Fi access and Wi-Fi Software Access Point

Cons 坏处:

• AP set up can be confusing
• No FIX PCI/AGP

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.

Product Excellence