Asus A8V Deluxe

[usher]

I am tempted to buy the Asus A8V mobo, socket 939 for my forthcoming Athlon 64 & altho it gets a good rating in various mags for speed & just about everything else it seems to be a pain to set up, something to do with windows not seeing serial ATA drives .

Have any of you guys fitted this board ? did you get problems ? any advice welcomed before I send off to get it.

 

[mkillio]

My friend has had that problem. Although, he just got a second SATA drive and he installed windows on that without a problem. However, windows doesn't recognize his old SATA drive.

 

[usher]

mmm beginning to have doubts about this mobo ,might consider another.

 

[Nathan]

It's pretty hard to go wrong with Asus. The A8V works just fine in my experience.

 

[_xxx_]

I only buy Abit (since when Pentium II appeared), mainly for the stability and their wonderful BIOS.

 

[T2k]

I used to have Abits for a long time but they simply put everything on VIA's crap - and I don't buy VIA, sorry. I found it ridiclous that VIA didn't have AGP ?PCI lock by default in KT800 - classic loser VIA.

I hate Asus - arrogant @ssholes. Remember hwen they printed out few pictures upside down in their old (IIRC KT266-based) mobo manual? They simply did nothing after tonz of people smoked their CPUs...

Go with NF3 Ultra. I have Gigabytes now, and the latest one, the K8NS Ultra 939 (office PC) is just perfect. Their support is kinda OK: I phoned them few times (California) and always got some pretty slow brained chinese guy - and always ended up that Technical Support sent me to Customer Service.
At least tyou can call them, mail them, they are responsive folks.

Here are the mobo: http://www.giga-byte.com/Motherboard/Products/Products_GA-K8NS Ultra-939.htm
SPecs: http://www.giga-byte.com/MotherBoard/Products/Products_Spec_GA-K8NS Ultra-939.htm

Buy a 3500+ 90nm A64 - new "Winchester" core, 1.4V only - and you can easilky run at 2.5GHz on air, stock cooling.

 

[Dio]

I've got an A8V on my main work machine.

The Serial ATA thing is a non-problem as long as you have another PC. There's a utility on the CD to create the disk you need so the XP installer can see the Serial ATA drive.

Overall I'd say it's a decent board, I've been using it a few months now and had zero problems. Not sure how it compares with others because it's the only 939 board here. I didn't need the WiFi option, but it looks like it's just a PCI card, which may be useful in a different machine at some point (I'm not sure it works on a different board though).

 

[_xxx_]

I used to have Abits for a long time but they simply put everything on VIA's crap - and I don't buy VIA, sorry. I found it ridiclous that VIA didn't have AGP ?PCI lock by default in KT800 - classic loser VIA.

No comment on VIA, but my board is nForce2 based ABIT NF7

 

[T2k]

I used to have Abits for a long time but they simply put everything on VIA's crap - and I don't buy VIA, sorry. I found it ridiclous that VIA didn't have AGP ?PCI lock by default in KT800 - classic loser VIA.

No comment on VIA, but my board is nForce2 based ABIT NF7

My comment was on topic (S939) only...

 

[usher]

thanks for info guys, still looking / comparing before I decide.

 

[Tahir2]

I agree with Dio here, and some of these motherboard CD's are bootable allowing you to make a SATA floppy disk even on a PC without an OS.

Asus are the top selling tier one mobo manufacturer, they have excellent products IMHO and there sales/tech support may be slow but at least they have the decency to respond and have technically minded staff willing to help resellers - unlike some tier one motherboard manufacturers.

Asus may make small mistakes here and there but even since the original Asus K7 motherboard for Slot A processors they haven't made any serious boo-boo's in this market segment!

Informercial over with...

 

[AlphaWolf]

No problems as long as you have a way to make the driver disk. Installing raid on my A8V was completely painless.