ASUS A8V Preview - Page 2
- The Board
Below you can see the board layout. There
are 5 PCI slots, 1 AGP 8X/4X, 4 DIMMs for PC3200 memory, 2 IDE channels,
1 Floppy connector, 4 SATA connectors and the IDE channel supported by the
Promise on-board controller.
Removing the ASUS heat sink reveals the VIA K8T800Pro. There is no any extra
cooling fan here, supposing the heat sink is enough for the VIA
chipset. On the right you can easily recognize the CPU socket 939, and the
plastic
base for the retail AMD Athlon 64
cooling fan.
On the right bottom side of the board you can see the VIA VT8237 chipset,
the Promise SATA controller, the floppy connector, the serial port 2 connector,
the game/midi connector, and the additional USB 2.0 headers.
Right next to the PCI slots there is another VIA chipset (VT6307
for Firewire), the internal audio connectors and the IEEE1394 connector pins
(red):
The back panel includes the usual connectors and an optical/coaxial S/PDIF
output :
The
stability of the CPU cooling fan is ensured by a metal base available on the
other side of board.
- First impression
ASUS has a long tradition in the PC main board market and we always expect
qualitative parts by this brand. The ASUS A8V offers all those basic features
that a power user would
expect from a motherboard and additionally
the
included Wi-Fi
802.11g is definitely an advantage of the kit.
The question here would be whether AMD took the right decision when decided
to change the CPU socket kit. The first performance benchmarks with the new
Athlon 64/64FX (socket 939) will
answer
our questions
soon. Stay
tuned!
