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LOSTCIRCUITS	SHORTCUTS: Top page ASUS K8V Specs The Bundle Memory Limits VRM, Sound Total Connectivity BIOS BIOS details Test Configuration Athlon64 3200+ Memory Bandwidth Cachemem I/O Performance Winstones 3D Rendering ViewPerf 7.0 CineBench, Flask 3Dmarks UT2003, FFXI X2, Comanche4, MDK2 Aquamark3 WiFi, Overclocking, Conclusions Best Prices for Athlon 64 Processors Give Us Some Feedback to Help Us Improve our Reviews
AMD Athlon64 3200+ - ASUS K8V Deluxe The Middle Grounds
(Review by MS, November 3, 2003)

Fast Ethernet, that is 10/100baseT is almost becoming obsolete as standard in the current generation of mainboard. Gigabit is in and it's here to stay, even though in most cases the LAN infrastructure does not support it yet. The latter "chicken and egg" point, however, really does not matter, somebody has to make the first step. ASUS is using the Marvell-based 3Com Gigabit adapter, which plugs through the South Bridge into the V-Link interconnect to connect to the CPU and system memory.

      

Left: Five PCI slots, the bottom one being shared with the WiFi slot. Right: the headers for USB ports 5-8 along with the second COM port (in case it might be needed).

Storage Interface The K8V features two different controllers for mass storage devices such as HDDs or optical drives, that is, the VIA VT8237 South Bridge with support for two Parallel and two Serial ATA channels as well as the Promise PCD20378 SATA controller that is tied into the PCI bus. The Promise controller supports two SATA and a single Parallel IDE interface, hence, we are looking at a grand total of three parallel connectors (supporting 6 devices) and four SATA connectors. The PDC20378 controller is a bridge design featuring the integrated Marvell Parallel-to-Serial bridge converter.

      

Left: the VIA South Bridge with the two SATA connectors. Right, the Promise PDC20378 Bridge SATA controller with its two ports and the additional Parallel ATA connector (blue), the Game Port, standby power LED and color-coded front panel connector.

The VIA VT8237 controller is, according to the claims made by VIA a native SATA controller and as such should be blessed with approximately 50% reduced command overhead, which, in turn should reflect in greatly increased I/O performance. Keep in mind, though, that VIA also announced a partnership with Maxtor to bring native SATA RAID to the desktop, an interesting claim in view of the fact that Maxtor does not manufacture native SATA drives. In other words, there appears to be some confusion about what Native SATA really is and what it is not. We'll have a number of benchmarks addressing these issues later in this review for a comparison of the "slow" Promise Bridge controller and the "Native" VIA solution.

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