ASUS A8V-XE - motherboard - ATX - K8T890

Author's product rating:   

Speed	Very fast
Ease of Installation	Good - quick to install
Stability	Very stable
Value For Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Stability, Overclockingfriendly & also Dirtcheap
Disadvantages:	Not really only minor annoyances

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

So good folks what we have here is a very stable, overclockfriendly & overall excellent s939 motherboard, considering the low pricetag + it has all the features you should need (SATA2 support & RAID etc.) unless if you want to go SLI/Crossfire and/or other fancy deluxe feats. as Firewire & such

edit: SLI is having 2 of exactly the same graphicscards from NVIDIA connected to each other via a bridge connector & Crossfire is the same but instead of NVIDIA cards, its AMD/ATI cards. SATA2 is a newer standard that doubles the data transfer speed from 150MB/s to 300MB/s on harddisks that have that utilizes that interface (most newer does)
RAID is used when having 2 or more of exactly the same harddisks to make them run faster by mirroring them, or to prevent datalosses (i´m not sure which one to use, however RAID0 ,RAID1, RAID0+1 RAID 5 & JBOD are supported, but my knowledge is limited in the RAID area as I have never used it)

Furthermore from my own experience on many "budget" AMD64 boards you wont be able to set the FSB over 300 without issues , but with this one no worries, I´m currently running my Opteron 165 @2.7ghz (300 FSB*9 Multi) my system is rock stable 24/7...period.
I have also tested 2835MHz but got some heat issues on full load (I´m using air-cooling).

The negative i can think of is the color of the PCB, no Firewire (as mentioned in the beginning of the rewiev) & the fact that its refusing to post when using certain obscure RAM configurations (SS + DS for example, but thats only a minor issue/annoyance), and also some thirdparty apps refuses to add support for some of the diodes/thermistors on the board (not ASUS fault though).

Edit: SS stands for singlesided & DS for Doublesided, diodes & thermistors are sensors on the motherboard that usually measures temperatures.

The overall value/buildquality of this board as with all other ASUS boards I have ever owned is IMO close to flawless.

I can highly recommended this s939 pci-e motherboard to any AMD64 s939 CPU/PCI-E graphicscard owners except perhaps the extreme overclockers or those who wants to run dual graphiccards.

As I bought this board quite a while ago, so there should probably be newer/better alternatives out now I´m not sure which ones though.

Oh I almost forgot it´s also fully 32/64-bit compatible. (I haven´t tested Vista on it though).

Some specs: ( I can´t guarantee them to be 100% correct)

ATX Form Factor: 12 in X 8.3 in (30,5 cm X 21 cm)
Northbridge: VIA K8T890
Southbridge: VIA VT 8251
Graphics Interface: PCI-E 16x
BIOS: Phoenix, ACPI
RAM Support: max 4X1GB (in 64bit OS) up to PC-4000 DDR500
Audio:6-channel onboard HD-Audio provided by SoundMax or digital out via S/PDIF
USB: Supports up to 8 High-speed 2.0 USB Ports

As I can´t possibly list all specs without transforming this review into a manual ;) so this will have to suffice, if you need/want more info then go ahead & visit the ASUS site to download a manual in .pdf format.

I hope by writing this somewhat brief review (my first one actually) that the reader/s got some needed hints/info before making the descision to go for a purchase & that the buyer enjoys the board as much as i have done/still does.

note: the edits were done on request as nobody knows all about everything, so I will try to explain better &/or let people know what i expect them to know in order to understand better. (if in doubt let me know what you dont understand so I can try to help, if I can´t then maybe some googlesearching provides the answers for you).

As in most cases you get what you pay for & in this case it´s all good & plenty.