Socket 939 Roundup: Battle at the Top
by Wesley Fink on July 30, 2004 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Asus A8V Deluxe: Features and Layout
| Asus A8V Deluxe - Revision 2.0 Motherboard Specifications |
|
| CPU Interface | Socket 939 Athlon 64 |
| Chipset | VIA K8T800 PRO/VT8237 |
| Bus Speeds | 200MHz to 300MHz (in 1MHz increments) |
| CPU Ratios | 4x - 20x in 0.5x increments |
| PCI/AGP Speeds | Auto, 66.66/33.33, 75.4/37.7 |
| HyperTransport | Auto, 200MHz to 1GHz (1x-5x) |
| Core Voltage | 0.80V to 1.80V in 0.025V increments |
| DRAM Voltage | Auto, 2.5V to 2.8V in 0.1V increments |
| AGP Voltage | 1.5V, 1.6V |
| V-Link Voltage | 2.5V, 2.6V |
| Memory Slots | Four 184-pin DDR DIMM Slots Dual-Channel Unbuffered Memory to 4GB |
| Expansion Slots | 1 AGP 8X Slot 5 PCI Slots |
| Onboard SATA/IDE RAID | 2 SATA 150 drives by VIA VT8237 Can be combined in RAID 0, 1, JBOD PLUS 2 SATA by Promise 20378 |
| Onboard IDE | Two Standard VIA ATA133/100/66 (4 drives) PLUS 1 IDE 133/100/66 by Promise 20378 |
| Onboard USB 2.0/IEEE-1394 | 8 USB 2.0 ports supported by VIA VT8237 2 IEEE 1394 FireWire Ports by VIA VT6307 |
| Onboard LAN | Gigabit Ethernet by Marvell 88E8001 |
| Onboard Audio | Realtek ALC850 8-Channel with SPDIF |
| Tested BIOS | 1006 Beta 2 |
When Asus first introduced the A8V Deluxe it was the only Socket 939 board we had received with no AGP/PCI lock. Asus did not advertise an AGP/PCI lock and, in fact, it was not even listed as an option. When we talked with Asus about why they would leave out such a key feature of the VIA K8T800 PRO chipset, we were told Asus had concerns about the stability of the feature, and would not release a board with a lock until they were confident of the stable operation of the feature. While we did receive several prototypes with impressive performance and a working lock, Asus US did not give us the go-ahead that these interim designs would ever become production boards. For that reason, we did not believe it was fair to AnandTech readers to review an excellent design that they might never see in production.
Several weeks ago, Asus advised that they had completed a new Revision 2.0 with a number of board refinements and a working PCI/AGP lock that would soon be released. We had been very pleased with the revisions of the A8V we had evaluated, so we had great expectations of Revision 2.0. As you will see in the performance numbers and overclocking of the Asus A8V we were not disappointed.
The A8V Deluxe is the top-of-the-line Asus board for Socket 939, as you see reflected in the feature set. The A8V can be considered an update of the successful Asus K8V with the significant addition of the VIA K8T800 PRO chipset with, finally, a working PCI/AGP lock. Asus tells us that Revision 2.0 is more than just the addition of a production PCI/AGP lock, as they also used the update as an opportunity to refine the design.
As the Asus flagship Socket 939 the A8V Deluxe provides all the expected VIA K8T800 PRO/VT8237 features like 2-drive SATA RAID, 8 USB ports, and Hyper Transport to 1GHz. In addition Asus adds Marvell Gigabit LAN, The Promise PDC20378 RAID controller supporting 2 more SATA drives plus an additional IDE connector, Firewire, and the Realtec ALC850 8-channel codec. Asus calls their top boards AI, and the A8V includes a long list of proprietary Asus AI features like C.P.R., AI Net, AI BIOS, EZ Flash BIOS, and Q-Fan 2 fan-speed controls. The A8V also fully supports AMD Cool'n'Quiet.
Too often, we forget to mention that Asus is a huge proponent of Wi-Fi, and most of their boards include Wi-Fi capabilities. The A8V Deluxe is another Wi-Fi Home board, but the included adapter is now the higher-speed Wi-Fi G instead of the older and slower B standard. Asus even includes a desktop antenna to ease your communication with a wireless router or to serve as host for other Wi-Fi computers.
The overclocking controls are excellent in their range as we have come to expect on Asus boards. Noteworthy are the ratios in fine 0.5x ratios which makes OC fine-tuning that much easier on 939 CPUs. The CPU voltage also covers a very wide range from 0.8V to 1.80 volts. Our only complaint here is that 300 CPU Clock is a little short for a board that can do 289 at 1:1 memory, and the memory voltage controls are really limited at a top of 2.8V when we have performance memory warranted to 3.0V. Otherwise the variety and range of BIOS adjustments is excellent.
The layout of the A8V Deluxe is excellent. Both the 20-pin ATX and the 4-pin 12V connectors are on board edges and don't interfere with the CPU. The IDE connectors are in our preferred upper right edge of the board. Some will hate the floppy edge connector, but we liked getting it out of the way, and the floppy is also a connector many users don't use any way. The 4-dimm connectors, for up to 4GB of Dual-Channel memory, are well clear of the AGP 8X slot when changing memory. Asus is an advocate of quiet, failure-free passive chipset cooling, and you will see that in the massive heatsink used on the Northbridge. There's little to complain about in the layout of the Asus A8V Deluxe Rev.2.
Rear panel I/O is also very complete, including 6 audio mini jacks, both optical and coaxial SPDIF outputs, 4 USB, LAN, Firewire, 1 serial port, parallel port, and the usual PS2 keyboard and mouse ports. We were particularly pleased to see easily accessible optical and coax SPDIF ports and wish other manufacturers paid as much attention to this feature as Asus has in their recent board designs.
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thebluesgnr - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
"Our FX53 topped out at about 3.59 GHz on the ECS KV2, which is slightly below the 3.6+ achieved on the top 939 boards."Is this ECS a P4 board? :P
This was a great article. I agree with other readers, CnQ should definately have been tested, as well as audio and IDE subsystems.
btw Wesley, will there be reviews of KT880 socket A mobos in the future?
TrogdorJW - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
Just a few comments. It's a little (*little* mind you) unfair to compare FX-53 to P4 560, given the price advantage of the P4. Then again, comparing it to the P4EE is a little unfair in the other direction. It might have been nice to include one or two other systems in the benchmarks, though, like a 3400+. Sure, we can cross-reference other articles, but if you have all the data already it would be a lot cleaner. I'm especially interested in seeing AutoGK benchmarks with the "lesser" Athlon 64 processors (3500+ and 3400+ would be good, or maybe even 3200+ - not everyone has $400+ to spend on a CPU!)Of course, while it might be less fair to Intel, I would like to get AutoGK numbers using Xvid as well. That's how I use it, as I feel the quality is a little better than DivX. Oh, and while you state that you used 2-pass encoding, what was the target resolution? 640x360, or 720x408, or something else? And did you specify a target size, or was it on unlimited quality? All those are important questions, I think.
One final request: I truly appreciate the memory stress testing benchmarks. However, I would like it taken a little further. All of the boards claim that they can support up to 4 GB of RAM. I would love to see some tests showing this configuration. After all, 64-bits is really about breaking that memory barrier. Even if the boards need to run 4x1GB at DDR266 or DDR333, it would be good to know. (Too bad there simply aren't many good 1 GB DIMMs available yet.)
Wesley Fink - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
#14 & #20 - Perhaps tests with the X800 XT on nF3 compared to the 6800 Ultra will at least shed a little light on where the efficiencies lie - in the nF3/nV Video combo or in the nF3 itself.#16 - We will make an effort to talk a bit more about Cool'n'Quiet in individual board reviews, but in a roundup like this it is difficult to explore that level of detail, and still hold the article length to anthing you might want to read. We try to do more with features in individual reviews.
#19 - We report the full range of vCore in our board charts for people like you who are interested in umdervolting. If you notice some boards begin vCore at default, while others make a wide undervolt range available as well as overvolt. We try to report this range as accurately as possible for this reason.
Pete - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
Wesley, very interesting numbers. Halo is supposedly limited by some inefficient DX9 layers/commands, so I at first thought maybe nV had somehow optimized or bypassed some DX9 calls. The office and Content Creation benchmarks advantage is more puzzling, though. Could nV's performance edge be the result of some intelligent caching or either the HD or the CPU?Testing an X800 for reference is a good idea for Halo. Just be sure to retest the office and Content Creation suites, too, as the performance boost there is equally curious, IMO.
I found one typo, on the system specs page. It's Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, not Wolfenstein: Enemy Within. :)
JKing76 - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
Sure there's Cool'n'Quiet, but how about adding manual undervolting capabilities to the review? A lot of mobos only allow upping the vcore, but undervolting is a great tool for creating a truely cool and quiet system without losing performance.XRaider - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
Love that FX53 and the MSI K8N Neo2 together. Sure is purdy nice!! ;) But must...hold...out...until...price..drops...some..more.. ;o)Great article BTW!
XRaider - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
Love that FX53 and the MSI K8N Neo2 together. Sure is purdy nice!! ;) But must...hold...out...until...price..drops...some..more.. ;o)Great article BTW!
jojo4u - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
I miss information about Cool'n'Quiet. It's a shame that anandtech.com only is insterested in overclocking and speed.esSJae - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
Nice, another article touting the non-existent MSI K8N Neo2.Sure, you can go to MSI's Taiwan site and download the manual and BIOS, but doesn't seem to be much point in that.
DAPUNISHER - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
"We never expected the nVidia nForce3-250 Ultra to be a better performer in Winstone benchmarks than the VIA K8T800 PRO. However, both the nF3-250 boards are outperforming the VIA boards by a significant percentage. Since the nVidia 6800 Ultra video card was used for all benchmarking in the roundup, we plan to verify these results with an ATI X800 XT as soon as that board is available to the Motherboard Lab for testing"Is this to determine if it's a result of forceware opts that is responsible for the difference observed?