Asus K8V Deluxe K8T800 Motherboard Review

BIOS Features

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

The Asus K8V Deluxe uses an AMI bios that offers a lot to users also.

The Configuration for overclocking options starts in the Frequency/Voltage menu. Here you can change the processor FSB (which is a misnomer really, on the Athlon 64 processors), CPU voltage, AGP voltage, DDR voltage and V-Link Voltage.

Up to 300 MHz internal bus! Good luck reaching that…

Though you do get a nice CPU voltage increase too up to 1.8v.

There is also a very ambiguous term in here called “Performance Mode”. There are five possible settings, Standard, Turbo1-3 and Safe.

These are apparently percentage based, automatic overclocking options for the processors internal bus (called FSB above). I booted into Windows with each of these settings enabled and everything else as default, and used CPU-Z to find the actual bus speeds. Here are our results:

• Safe: 200 MHz = 2.0 GHz
• Standard: 200.3 MHz = 2.0 GHz
• Turbo1: 200 MHz = 2.0 GHz
• Turbo2: 205 MHz = 2.05 GHz
• Turbo3: 201 MHz = 2.01 GHz

Needless to say, I wasn’t really impressed by the results I got, but I didn’t expect to be. What was curious to me was the fact that the Turbo settings didn’t seem to be that different from the Standard or Safe. Its possible that this setting was changing timings and other settings that I couldn’t judge or tell were different that would result in a minimal difference in overall performance. But, if you are looking for overclocking options, I’d have to recommend you stick to the standard methods.

Moving to the Memory Configuration menu, we see a long list of timings to play with and adjust according the specific memory that you own.

Here are the options for the memory ratio in relation to the processors internal bus speed.

There are options to edit the width and speed of the HyperTransport bus between the processor and the north bridge, but they are defaulted in the bios to their maximum settings, so increasing performance from these isn’t really an option.

All of the on-board features can be disabled in the bios so that you don’t have to clutter up your hardware settings unnecessarily. I’ve always recommended that you only enable the devices you are using – less chance for error this way.

Asus included a unique feature on some of their latest motherboards, called Instant Music. This allows the user to boot into a BIOS-based audio CD playing program without needing to boot into Windows or any other operating system. Using the F-keys, you can navigate tracks and control volume, if you are using the on-board audio controller only.

Speech reporting is something that several motherboard manufacturers have started to include. There is nothing better than a freaking voice coming out of your on-board speaker telling you your memory isn’t installed correctly! 🙂

Finally, we see that Asus has included support for the AMD Cool ‘n Quiet feature to allow dynamic voltage to CPU fans if the heat on the processor goes down due to light loads.