|
Advice Beginners BIOS Guide CPUs Links Mainboards Memory Network Storage Video/Sound Cards Contact Forum SiteMap Sponsors WebNews Home |
. | . |
|
Prices: CPU Intel P4 2.4C-800 P4 2.6C-800 P4 2.8C-800 P4 3.0-800 P4 3.2-800 AMD AthlonXP XP 1700+ XP 2000+ XP 2400+ XP 2500+ XP 2700+ XP 3000+ XP 3200+ Athlon64 Athlon64 3200+ Athlon64 FX-51 Opteron Opteron 240 Opteron 242 Opteron 244 Opteron 246 Memory Corsair Crucial Kingston Mushkin OCZ |
LOSTCIRCUITS
|
|
| AMD Athlon64 3200+ - ASUS K8V Deluxe The Middle Grounds | |
|
(Review by MS, November 3, 2003) |
| K8V Deluxe At: |
The Board
The K8V is built on a relatively wide PCB and features a rather spacious layout where nothing appears cramped. In addition to the AGP and the five PCI slots, the board features the ASUS WiFi slot for use with the proprietary ASUS WiFi module described earlier.
Memory Limitiations
The three memory slots are color coded, that is, there are one blue and two yellow slots. DIMMs should be installed starting with DIMM slot#1 (blue), followed by the yellow slots. As a rule of thumb, filling the two yellow DIMM slots will require to run the memory at lower frequencies, that is, with single-sided modules, the ASUS manual still specifies DDR333, however, with double-sided DIMMs in slots 2 and 3, only DDR200 is specified.
The same limitations apply for having all three DIMM slots filled. A complete listing of all configurations is given in the manual. Bottom line is that the optimal configuration is to use two double-sided DIMMs in slots 1 and 2 or slots 1 and 3. Since the K8V uses only 5 PCI slots, the AGP slot is positioned lower than in 6 PCI slot boards, as a result, there is no interference whatsoever with the DIMM slots, that is, there is free access to each DIMM slot even with an oversized heatspreader-clad graphics adapter.
VRM
Left: the ADP 3166 multi-phase controller. Right: Each phase consists of the ADP3418 driver chip and two different MOSFETs.
Similar to the solution we described for the ASUS SK8N dual channel nForce150 board, the K8V uses the Analog Devices ADP3166 programmable two-to-four phase power controller with the ADP 3418 dual n-channel gate drivers. For "soft" switching of the individual phases, ASUS resorts to differential channels by using STMicro and Fairchild MOSFETs for the upper and the lower switch. Of course, this does not increase the number of phases but superimposes different ramps with internal "canceling" out of the peaks. Overall, a very solid solution that should not have any problems supplying clean power to the Athlon64.
Onboard Sound
One of the key selling points for the latest VIA South Bridge is the integration of Vinyl Audio, an integrated sound solution supposed to be equivalent or even better than nVidia's SoundStorm, as long as the necessary VIA Envy 8 track audio controller or else the VIA Six-TRAC AC'97 is used. In the case of the K8V, ASUS is using the AnalogDevices AD 1980 audio CODEC, which uses SoundMAX 3 software for support of 5.1 six channel audio. The manual features the instructions of how to enable Virtual Theater surround sound and Virtual Ear, however fails to point out that the respective features require separate purchasing of the additional software modules for US$19.99 and 24.99, respectively, in order to download them. Bummer .... We would have expected those modules to be included on the driver CD as part of the software bundle.
The test was done using the Zalman ZM-RS6F surround sound headphones that are rather unforgiving with respect to noise and reveal problems that are not overt with standard speakers. Positional audio was working very well within the limitations of headphones, that is, some positional cues are lost here since headphones, no matter the design cannot mimick phase shifts used for precision location of sound sources by the human ear.
Overall, the sound quality is fair, however, at low volume, the sound picks up the spinning up of the HDD and other static and not so static noises. For example, any movement or click of the mouse caused scratching noises, which can become rather annoying. Arguably, the overall quality of noise suppression is much better than in the case of the A7N8X but it is still a far cry from the much cleaner solution on the SK8N, which was virtually silent with respect to unwanted background noise.
next page: => Total Connectivity =>
If you enjoyed reading this article and found it useful, please consider making a small donation to LostCircuits.