BIOSTAR K8VHA Pro has quite good performance especially in the 3D benchmark tests. This is probably due to matured VIA AGP drivers and its outstanding RD that tweak the chipset for maximum 3D speed. On contrary, the disk performance is a bit low compared to most other platforms in comparison. Although the VIA K8T800 implements a full 16 bits processor-to-chipset HyperTransport link. The VLink could be the bottleneck that affected some of the scores of some benchmarks. The IDE performance is also not as strong as the other two.In fact, in CCWS and BWS which is highly dependent on IDE performance, the results were average despite the fact that 8237 should be an enhanced south bridge supporting both IDE and SATA.

Installation is quite straightforward as the front panel connectors are all colour coded. The only annoying thing is the capacitors near the Socket which blocks the heatsink clips. It is better if BIOSTAR could move the capacitors away from the Socket 754. The documentation is also very simple without much detailed information. It could have included a multilingual manual.

Overclocking wise, we managed to pull it up to 218MHz FSB at CAS 2.5, 6-3-3. It is quite stable at that FSB. As we are unable to increase the voltage levels, we tried another thing, that is to run the CPU:MEM at 200:166, It only helped a bit and we are able to push the CPU up to 221MHz FSB and the Q3 scores 378fps which is not alot from the default 200:200 at CAS 2, 5-2-2. The memory performance also dipped to 2800+ since I am running the memory lower than the CPU at the ratio of 200:166.

Suggested Retail : NA

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Pros 好处:

• 6 Channel audio
• USB 2.0 
• Dual LAN Gigabit
• 1394
• SATA RAID

Cons 坏处:

• No IDE RAID
• 2 DIMM slots
• No voltage tweaks for overclocking

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.