AMD Athlon 64 3200+ and the Asus K8V Deluxe

by Josh Walrath

The clip is attached by the use of a flathead screwdriver, and not a whole lot of force is needed to secure it.  The clip is built so robustly that the chance of the screwdriver slipping out and damaging the motherboard is very slim.

     The CD is packed with software that can be easily installed, and is actually quite useful. The necessary drivers are included, and they are all fairly up to date. The SoundMax functionality with the AD1980 chip is quite robust, and a user can tweak the sound to a great degree. I do like the SoundMax setup quite a bit more than the typical sound software included with the Realtek ALC series of chips. The Asus PC Probe is a solid hardware monitoring program that fits the exact specifications of the board. If running an Asus board, then there is really no need to use the MBM 5.X series of software products when PC Probe is available. Other utilities include PC-Cillin 2002, Promise RAID management, the Asus BIOS Update, Acrobat Reader 5.0, Asus screensaver, and the Winbond voice editor. Also packed in is the ability to load your own bootup/post screen (MYLogo2). This is of more interest to OEM’s than the average user.

     Another intriguing aspect of the CD is the ability to recover a bad BIOS flash. If for some reason the BIOS flash fails, then simply insert the CD, start the computer, and it will boot from the CD and you can recover (and hopefully reflash) the BIOS. For obvious reasons I didn’t particularly want to try this out. However, the setup appears to work, and I have not heard any negative comments about the functionality in past Asus products.

The lever at the other side is then rotated and locked into place, thereby placing the correct amount of pressure on the CPU to ensure good contact.

     One thing that is missing are floppy disks containing the drivers for the SATA drivers. Neither the Promise nor VIA SATA controller is considered native, so when loading Windows XP (or any other Windows product), a user still needs a floppy disk to correctly install the SATA drivers for Windows to use for installation. This can be a pain, especially if the average user doesn’t have another computer handy to go and make a driver disk from. Running from the PATA IDE on the VIA controller of course does not pose this problem. Installing from the Promise IDE connector also results in the use of a floppy disk for the correct drivers.

     Inside the box are quite a few extras. First up is the 5.1 edition of WinDVD Suite. This is a very nice little bundle that works with a variety of sound cards to give true 5.1 support. Included is WinDVD, WinDVD Creator (capture, edit, and burn to DVD), and WinRIP which allows high quality MP3 ripping, encoding, and playback. A pretty impressive little extra to be included with a motherboard bundle. The Firewire, USB 2.0, and SPDIF brackets are also included for installation with the motherboard. 3 black IDE cables, 1 black floppy, 2 SATA cables, as well as the 4 pin molex to 7 pin SATA power adapter are included. A very solid package, with the only thing missing the Asus WiFi adapter. I imagine including that would raise the price significantly over what Asus was targeting. Apparently there will be a model of the K8V Deluxe that will ship with the WiFi@Home adapter, but this particular bundle did not include it.

The CPU and heatsink are now correctly installed.  The system is about as close to foolproof as it can get at this time.  It would be hard to damage a CPU with both this setup and the heatspreader.  AMD has designed a very solid cooling implementation for the Athlon 64.

     Overall Asus made a very impressive package that should satisfy most users. Now the big question is how it performs. Again, due to this being the first Athlon 64 motherboard I have ever tested, I put it up against an Athlon XP 3000+ on the Asus A7N8X Deluxe (nForce 2 400 Ultra).

Test Setup

Athlon 64 3200+

Asus K8V Deluxe

Leadtek GeForce FX 5900 Ultra w/ 51.75 Drivers

1 GB Mushkin PC3200 Level II

80 GB Seagate SATA 150 Drive on the VIA SATA Controller

Toshiba DVD-ROM Drive

SoundMax Integrated Sound

3Com Gig-e Controller

Athlon XP 3000 Setup

Athlon XP 3000+

Asus A7N8X Deluxe

Leadtek GeForce FX 5900 Ultra w/ 51.75 Drivers

1 GB Mushkin PC3200 Level II

80 GB Seagate SATA 150 Drive on the Silicon Image SATA Controller

Toshiba DVD-ROM Drive

SoundStorm Integrated Audio

Realtek 10/100 Ethernet Controller

Windows XP Pro SP1

DirectX 9.0a

Tests Used

SiSoft Sandra Max

HD Tach

Aquamark 3

Gunmetal Benchmark 2

Sciencemark 2.0

3D Mark 2001 SE

Quake III Arena w/ 1.32 Point Release

RealStorm Benchmark

     I highlighted some of the more significant numbers in red throughout the results section.  These are areas where the reader should really take notice of the differences.

Next: Results

Copyright 1999-2003 PenStar Systems, LLC.