Conclusion
We have to admit that ASUS A8V-E Deluxe mainboard based on the new PCI Express chipset from VIA, K8T890, left a pretty disappointing impression. The features offered by the VIA K8T890 appeared somewhat weaker than those provided by the competing NVIDIA nForce4 series, and moreover, the mainboard from ASUS turned out not a real success.
VIA K8T890 chipset is definitely late for the market. The first actual mainboards based on it are coming out only now, but the features this chipset offers will hardly surprise anybody. The major drawbacks of this chipset are obsolete integrated Serial ATA RAID controller supporting only two ports and featuring no NCQ, and Fast Ethernet interface, which looks very outdated against the competitors?Gigabit Ethernet solutions. However, despite these drawbacks, VIA K8T890 will find its place in inexpensive systems, because it does support Socket 939 CPUs and PCI Express interface. Moreover, its overclocking friendly options also look pretty good on paper: this solution can clock PCI and PCI Express busses asynchronously, and is much more stable than nForce4 at high HyperTransport frequencies.
This way, VIA K8T890 can still have a piece of the pie. If the mainboard makers manage to design stable, reliable and functional solutions based on it, the chipset may even win the hearts of some dedicated hardware enthusiasts.
Today we also introduced to you one of the attempts to design a mainboard like that. However, unfortunately, this attempt didn’t turn out a success. ASUS A8V-E Deluxe mainboard based on VIA K8T890 chipset appeared a pretty raw product with quite a few unpleasant implementation flaws. In the nearest future we are going to look at other mainboards on the same chipset, so maybe our impression will improve with the time.
Anyway, the overall verdict about ASUS A8V-E Deluxe is not very promising. Even if you use this mainboard in the nominal default mode, you can still face some problems. Hopefully, many of these problems will be eliminated in the future versions of the mainboard BIOS, although the fourth version still had them as we have just seen.
Highs:
- Integrated WiFi controller;
- IEEE1394 support;
- Rich overclocking friendly options in the BIOS;
- Supports dynamic overclocking and Cool’n’Quiet, allows controlling the processor fan rotation speed depending on the CPU temperature.
Lows:
- Unstable with certain memory modules;
- Doesn’t support USB 2.0 devices;
- Doesn’t start at clock generator frequencies beyond 266MHz;
- Not very high performance;
- Scarce memory controller settings;
- Inconvenient PCB design.
