By Jeff Bouton
October 26, 2003

Specifications & Features of the ASUS K8V Deluxe Only the best features allowed

The ASUS K8V Deluxe Motherboard:

Like the MSI K8T, the ASUS K8V is a great looking board, with an attractive color scheme and intelligent layout.  Also based on the VIA K8T800 chipset, the K8V Deluxe is equipped with 3 DIMM slots for support of up to 3GBs of DDR RAM.  The Northbridge comes with passive cooling, however, the design is not the most effective for dissipating heat.  We think a taller, more extruded heat sink like MSI's is more effective at wicking heat away from the chipset.  The orientation of the IDE and Floppy connections was conducive to proper airflow in the case, with a low profile design and positioning perpendicular to the front of the board.  Even the SATA RAID connections were situated inline with each other neatly nestled between the one RAID IDE connector and the Promise R20378 RAID controller.  The Promise controller is the most flexible with RAID 0, 1 and 0+1.  The VIA VT8237 Southbridge also supports SATA RAID capable of RAIDing two SATA Drives in a RAID 1 or 0 array.  The on-board audio is a robust 6.1 package powered by a SoundMax ADI AD1980, 6-channel CODEC.

We liked the contrast of the ATX connection's color coding, making it easy to distinguish which pins are meant to be paired together.  The additional USB headers are along the same edge of the board followed by the WiFi controller port adjacent to the 5th PCI slot, which resembles the end of an IDE cable.  The board has a total of 5 PCI slots which allows for plenty of expansion considering the amount of integrated components.  The AGP slot has the preferred levered locking mechanism and does not interfere in any way with the ability to add or remove RAM with a video card installed.  One minor annoyance was the position of the BIOS jumper.  While we didn't notice a problem upon initial inspection, when we were forced to clear the BIOS while experimenting with overclocking, we had trouble getting our fingers in between the battery and PCI slot.  We didn't think this would be an issue since this board comes with a feature called CPU Parameter Recall that is supposed to reset the system automatically if it locks due to overclocking, but we had to resort to the old fashioned way of clearing the BIOS for the most part.

The rear I/O ports included the expected PS/2, Serial and LPT connections, however, in what would normally be home for the first Serial port, ASUS placed the on-board audio S/PDIF out.  As we move to the right, a single standard FireWire and two USB 2.0 ports are located followed by another 2 USB ports topped by an RJ-45 for Gb LAN.  The on-board audio header has connections for Line-In, Line-Out and Microphone.  The remaining functions of the 6-channel audio is handled with headers and expansion modules included in the bundle.

The system has several catchy features that are more flashy than useful, but they are pretty cool just the same.  The first item to catch our attention what the ASUS MyLog2 feature that let's you flash your BIOS with a customized boot logo.  The BIOS is also equipped with a CrashFree BIOS2 which enables you to restore the BIOS from the setup CD if it ever becomes corrupted.  The ASUS Post Reporter is a voice that notifies you if you have any problems during POST.  This reminds me when car makers starting adding voice notifications when you left your door open or your lights on.  Last is the Instant Music feature that lets you run your CD-ROM drives for music playback without having to actually boot the machine.

The BIOS:

The K8V Deluxe came outfitted with an excellent BIOS.  The menu system is clean and direct, making every option easy to find.  The memory page offered an extensive array of choices for manipulating memory performance.  The greatest feature for the overclocker is the Memlock setting which provides memory divider options from 1:1, 4:3, 3:2, 5:3, 2:1.

The CPU clock has a generous, and seemingly optimistic, range of 200-300MHz at 1MHz increments.  With the current Athlon 64s, we won't come close to using that range, but things may change in the future.  To help with stability during the overclocking process, the DDR voltage can be set from 2.6v to 2.8v.  The other component  voltages were also adjustable like DDR, VCORE and VLINK.
 

Overclocking with the ASUS K8V Deluxe It Ain't Much, But I'll Take It.

While the MSI experience was rather straight forward, the ASUS K8V Deluxe yielded some unexpected behavior.  When we started out our test, we raised the clock generator to 205MHz and was surprised to find the system would not post.  Not only were we surprised that the system locked up so easily, but that it did not recover automatically with CPU Parameter Recall feature as it should.  In fact, when we cleared the BIOS and set the clock for 203 we got the same result.  Clearly something was not right since the MSI board was able to hit 218MHz.  After some investigation, we found the culprit.  With Memlock Mode set for Auto, this system would lock up with even the slightest increase in clock speed.  However, if we manually set it for DDR400, the condition went away, allowing us to push forward.  Whether this is a BIOS issue or a compatibility problem with our Kingston HyperX RAM is unclear, but the work around was successful nonetheless.

CPU @ 2GHz

CPU OVERCLOCKED @ 2.19GHz

 
This time around we managed to squeak the CPU a little higher than the MSI system at 2.19GHz with a little help from a 2.7v kick in DDR voltage.  This gave us an additional 190MHz which is a gain of 9.5%.  At this setting we had no problem completing several benchmarks, logging some nice increases.