Asus K8V Deluxe K8T800 Motherboard Review

Conclusion

This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.

While this is only officially a review of the Asus K8V Deluxe motherboard, you can tell from our benchmarks that, chances are, all the K8T800 motherboards will perform identically. Not only was this the case before with the Athlon XP processors, but now that the Athlon 64 processor takes the majority position of the north bridge by integrating the memory controller, there is even LESS to distinguish between motherboard manufacturers and even chipset manufacturers. While I didn’t include any NVIDIA nForce3 numbers in this review (I will in the next ones), it’s safe to say that the delta between it and the VIA K8T800 is going to be small, or non-existent, in nearly all cases.

Where motherboards will need to shine is in their features, bios and stability. And Asus did that on all accounts. The board had a lot of features including four SATA channels all with RAID capability, 6-channel audio (though you may want to upgrade) as well as Firewire and Gigabit LAN. There isn’t a lot more that Asus could include on the K8V Deluxe motherboard. Did we mention Wifi@Home as well?

The board layout itself was very good with only a couple of minor complaints, like the location of the CMOS jumper and north bridge heatsink. Otherwise, I have no complaints during my use of the motherboard. The board was also very stable with the default BIOS settings – I didn’t encounter a lock up or crash during testing at all, with the exception of minor overclocking tests.

The bios on the board is very robust, and as you saw from our images, has a lot of unique features to offer including the Instant Music and Speech POST Indicators. Also, Asus has a feature to allow you to include your own 256-color logo on the POST screen. BIOS recovery has also improved from Asus with the ability to boot off of a CD to repair a crashed BIOS and the BIOS keeps failed bios settings so you shouldn’t have to use the CMOS jumper. Maybe that’s why they tried to hide it?

The pricing on the K8V Deluxe is competitive for the Athlon 64 market, coming it at around $145 at the time of this posting. Competing boards are going for around $150 as well. No real price champion has been crowned yet…

With all the past success of the Asus nForce2 and P4 boards, I think many of our readers will be flocking to the Asus K8V Deluxe motherboard – and really have nothing to tell that should stop them. My experiences with the board were eerily positive, and I’d like to congratulate Asus on another excellent mainboard.

Find Prices on the Asus K8V Deluxe!

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