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| AMD Athlon64 3200+ - ASUS K8V Deluxe The Middle Grounds | |
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(Review by MS, November 3, 2003) |
| K8V Deluxe At: |
What You Get
The K8V ships with an extensive bundle of accessories, starting with a set of ribbon cables comprising one floppy, one 40 wire and two 80 wire UATA cables in fashionable black along with two red Serial ATA cables. Included is further a dual Y-split SATA power connector, one 4-port USB2.0 module as well as a single port firewire module in the form of back panel brackets. S/PDIF out is enabled via a standard optical / coax combo bracket and coax connector integrated into the ATX I/O panel.
ASUS WiFi Card
ASUS finally includes the ASUS WiFi-b "Wireless Fidelity" card, which complies with the 802.11b standard, as well as the necessary external antenna to plug in via coax connector. The WiFi adapter allows two different modes of operation, the first of which is the so-called "Soft Access Point" (SoftAP) mode where the adapter itself assumes a role as server (access point) and connects to other wireless clients.
Left: the hardware bundle. Right: the WiFi card in its TV-Dinner-like translucent plastic tray.
The second mode is the so-called "Station" mode, where the adapter either connects to a wireless access point, meaning that it functions as a client with the access point assigning the wireless IP, or else, goes into Ad-Hoc mode to connect to another computer with wireless connectivity. Needless to say that the module allows settings of 64/128bit Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) encryption as well as connectivity to access point with hidden SSID, in other words, with respect to privacy and security, the WiFi card is state of the art.
Keep in mind that the WiFi slot is shared with the fifth PCI slot, meaning that only one of the two can be used at a time. The WiFi card operates at the 2.4-2.5 GHz frequency band with a reach of ~ 100ft indoors and 300ft outdoors, respectively
Left: The Wifi adapter card. Right: two status LEDs signal link and data transmission activity.
Documentation, Drivers and Software
Documentation is provided as usual in the form of the printed manual, which, in general suffices but borders on the trivial with respect to the explanation of some of the BIOS features available. In other words, the explanations are a mere rehashing of the title without any insight regarding the actual functionality of the settings and could use a bit more attention to detail. One rather comical glitch concerns the Motherboard overview on pages 1-6 and 1-7 where the numbers above #11 are off by a factor of 1. The result is that the Firewire controller is labeled as PS/2 mouse, not to mention a few other mislabeling issues of similar nature. Errare humanum est
The second manual is an approximately 50 pages brochure / user guide for the WiFi-b card with excellent documentation in form of a step by step stop-action picture screenshot walk-through of every procedure potentially coming up during installation or use.
The driver CD appeared to have been a relatively early sample and was lacking the necessary drivers for the Promise RAID controller. Unfortunately, also the media quality was such that only one of the multiple CD and DVD-ROMs here was able to access the CD. Even then, burning a copy took over 20 minutes since the source drive appeared to have the hardest of times reading the data. A quality of the installation CD like that would be an immediate show-stopper in the retail version. Unfortunately, also, there are no floppies containing the necessary RAID drivers for a fresh installation of Windows2000 or XP, this is where companies like ABIT and AOpen have a definite edge over ASUS, especially, since this omission is completely uncalled for.
As bundled Software, ASUS includes the Intervideo WinDVD suite.
next page: => Meet the K8V =>
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