Review: Stuart "Veridian3" Davidson
Editor/Design: Allan "Zardon" Campbell

 

Installation of the board was a breeze, it is well laid out with good clearance around the AGP slot, Dimm Slots and the CPU. With the design/layout that ASUS have chosen this board feels the most spacious of any I have used. Even the huge Nvidia 5950 Ultra has plenty of clearance around all components. An often overlooked feature on motherboards is the placement of the floppy drive connector at times I’ve been left thiking that adding one was an afterthought on some boards. With the SK8V this is not the case, the floppy connector is side mounted at the middle of the board and will be in close proximity of just about any floppy drive in a standard case.

THE BUNDLE

The retail bundle for the SK8V is excellent, along with the board you receive:

MANUAL
Driver/Application Disk (also contains PC-Cillin 2002 antivirus)
2 Sata Cables
2 ATA 133 IDE cables
1 floppy drive cable
1 four port USB2 bracket
1 single port firewire bracket
1 S/PIDF out bracket
1 Molex to SATA power cable
WinDVD Suite, featuring WinDVD, WinCinema and WinRIP.
Instant Music Label
I/O Shield
Extra Jumper Caps
Asus Silver Case Sticker
Again, no skimping on the product. Not really much else that could be added to improve the pack.

INTERESTING FEATURES :
Whilst the following items are not necessarily unique to the SK8V, they are worth a mention so that you know what your getting with this board.

VOCAL POST MESSAGES:
Gone are they days of those confusing BIOS beeps that make you run to the net searching for the meaning of a particular beep code. The SK8V features vocal messages which can be enabled or disabled. By default a friendly (if not slightly robotic) female voice informs you that the PC has completed POST and is now booting the operating system. Any errors (such as lack of keyboard) are reported via the same method. Additionally ASUS provide a utility on the Driver CD which allows you to record your own version of the messages from within Windows.

INSTANT MUSIC PLAYBACK:
Sometimes there can be nothing more tedious than waiting for your PC to boot, Windows start-up slows down over time and if your not using the fastest processor in the world then you may get a bit board (sorry!). With the SK8V you have the option to play music direct from your hard drive following POST.

CRASHFREE BIOS:
As with many boards on the market the SK8V comes with software (ASUS update) which allows you to search for and install the latest BIOS from within Windows. But what if it goes wrong? Well, Asus have that covered too, with crash free bios you can boot from the Support CD and the system will flash back to the original BIOS at the time your product was shipped. A life saver!

A full list of features can be found here: http://usa.asus.com/products/mb/socket940/sk8v/overview.htm

The BIOS:

The BIOS that came with our board was 1002.006, a beta bios which was a strange occurrence. This is the first product which we have received that has come with a non retail BIOS. ASUS have chosen to use AMI Bios, rather than AWARD BIOS which most of you will be familiar with. AMI is simple to use, it is more the structure of the options rather than the functionality that is different. During the course of the last month we have used several different BIOS on the board. Including the only retail BIOS (1001) and beta’s (1002.012 1002.13 1002.16 and 1002.18). All have been completely stable at stock speeds. With the later beta’s (eg .018) items such as “jumperfree configuration” have been added to the BIOS. This option within the BIOS is aimed at the overclockers allowing you to change the FSB speed and voltages on your board. All of the standard options are available within the BIOS such as the ability to change CAS Latency of your RAM and enable/disable ECC and its sub options.

NOTE: I’d like to thank Wesley Fink from http://www.Anandtech.com for hooking us up with the additional beta BIOS.

Performance:

The following Benchmarks are taken from our Opteron 146 review. They show both the performance you can expect from the SK8V and additionally the gains that can be made with regards to using specific memory configurations. The tests were run in comparison to a Nforce2 based Athlon 3200+ system as no other Socket 940 board was available to us for testing.

 

Next: the test setup