Off the beaten track - Asus A8V-E Deluxe motherboard

[Taz]

I've decided to bite the bullet and order an Asus A8V-E Deluxe motherboard. It seems to fit the bill for my needs very well: under £100, WiFi built in, 2 x SATA (a bit limited if you've got more than 2 SATA drives but it has IDE as well), PCI-E and reasonable onboard sound. The chipset is the VIA K8T890, not as well reviewed as the nForce 4 chipsets.

Does anyone have any views or experiences of this motherboard or seen any reviews on it? I thought long and hard about going for an nForce 4 motherboard but could not justify the extra features you get (SATA 2, hardware firewall, SLi, etc.), as I probably would not end up using them anyway.

It 'only' has 8 USB 2.0 ports (as opposed to 10 for the nForce 4), only 2 SATA ports (many nForce 4 have an extra SATA controller providing a total of 4), but it does come with 3 PCI slots available which is quite useful I suppose.

[Rave]

If it's anything like the K8T800 Pro (which was faster in games than the NForce3), the K8T890 could be a very fast chipset. It's so new though that no-one really knows for sure. Overclockability is also uncertain although in the end boards like the Abit AV8 seemed to overclock fine once after a few bios revisions.

The real pity is that this board seems to be using the now rather outdated 8237 southbridge- VIA have been promisng a new southbridge with more SATA channels (with NCQ), 8 channel sound etc. etc. for ages now but it still doesn't seem to have shown up. I doubt that Asus would ship any board calling itself Deluxe with only two SATA ports though, I'm sure it'll have at least two more via an add-in controller.

Rich :¬)

[Taz]

Thanks for the response, Rich. Hopefully within the next few weeks i'll be able to provide some information on this motherboard on here once i've put everything together. What I do know is that there is no extra SATA controllers supplied so only 2 SATA connectors, which should be fine for most people.

[Rave]

Hmm yeah, seems you are right. That's a bit of a bizarre speccing decision on Asus's part TBH. Also, since it uses a PCI controller for the Gigabit Ethernet, that will likely underperform. That may not be a consideration for you though.

I would wait to see some reviews of this board TBH. Unless it's uber-fast in games, or it's very cheap compared to the NForce4 competition I'm inclined to say that it's not worth it. When VIA finally get their new southbridge out the door I reckon it'll reinvigorate their product line, but right now the 8237 is well past it's sell by date and makes the K8T890 a poor proposition IMO.

Anyone building an A64 rig right now might be well advised to wait and see if AMD come out with a new 90nm stepping. It's been on the cards for a while and may bring SSE3 and a better memory controller with it.

Rich :¬)

[Chunky]

would like to hear of your personal experiences with this board as im planning of getting one for my winchester 3000+ rig

its either this or spend another 50 odd quid on nforce 4 and get a less good gpu

keep us posted please

Chunky

[Taz]

Update: got my board today. Yes, it really does exist. And it also has the onboard 54G Wi-Fi and external antenna (unlike the MSI K8N Diamond) and it has a proper metal AMD-spec CPU backplate (unlike the Gigabyte K8 boards) allowing the use of high-end heatsinks.

Pretty good value at under £105 including postage. These boards are hard to get hold of at the moment but Eclipse have stock:

http://www.eclipsecomputers.com/prod...code=MBA-A8VED

I cannot comment on how the board performs at the moment as i'm still waiting for the CPU and graphics card before I can turn on the power...

[pumpman]

I had the non wifi version that i bought from kustom pc very nice package and nice for overclocking

[Taz]

For those that have this board, there's a fairly useful new BIOS out: 1005. Allows 1T/2T memory command rate selection and upgrades the 8237 RAID BIOS. Also has an assortment of new BIOS options.

I got a noticeable performance improvement with the 1005 BIOS in PCMark04. IMO, this is really the first 'proper' BIOS for this mobo.