Closer Look

Of course, if we only use the features of the VIA K8T890 chipset, the mainboard will turn out a budget solution. Therefore, ASUS engineers who wanted to make a good mainstream product had to use a few additional onboard controllers (not counting in the PHY-chips): a Gigabit network controller, a wireless network controller and an IEEE1394 controller. This way, ASUS A8V-E Deluxe mainboard is more than just a VIA K8T890 based solution: its features go a way beyond the chipset specifications.

As for the major functions, however, they are all brought by the chipset. This mainboard supports Socket 939 processors with HyperTransport bus working at 1GHz frequency and features four DDR DIMM slots. The DIMM slots assigned to different memory channels are placed separately and are of different color. So, if you would like to take full advantage of the Athlon 64 memory controller, you should use it in the dual-channel mode and hence install memory modules in pairs into slots of corresponding color.

Despite huge potential of Athlon 64 in terms of the size of supported memory, ASUS A8V-E Deluxe allows installing not more than 4GB of DDR SDRAM. Moreover, it will work only in DDR333 mode if you install the maximum supported amount of memory, and the system OS will still have somewhat less than the installed 4GB at its disposal because of the chipset architectural peculiarities. In case only two DIMM slots are occupied, this limitation is not valid any more and the memory can work in DDR400 mode.

For the graphics card and other add-on cards there is one PCI Express x16 slot, two PCI Express x1 slots and three 32bit/33MHz PCI slots.

The Serial ATA RAID controller, integrated sound and USB ports of the ASUS A8V-E Deluxe are all provided by the VIA K8T890 chipset. Let’s discuss all these functions in a little bit greater detail.

Two Serial ATA ports available on the ASUS A8V-E Deluxe mainboard support pretty traditional features set for the year 2003-2004. They support regular Serial ATA-150 hard drives. Note that NCQ support and higher data transfer rates typical of the Serial ATA II specification are not implemented on the ASUS A8V-E Deluxe. The hard disk drives connected to the Serial ATA ports can be united into RAID 0 or 1 arrays and then configured with the help of VIA’s own VIA RAID Tool utility:

Parallel ATA HDDs cannot be used to form RAID arrays.

Of course, we are very much interested in the performance of the Serial ATA RAID controller integrated into the VIA VT8237R chipset South Bridge. We decided to measure it in order to make our opinion about the controller efficiency. For this purpose we created a RAID 0 array of Western Digital Raptor WD360GD hard disk drives and connected it to the controller tested. All measurements were taken with the HDD Test Suite from FutureMark PCMark04 package. For a more illustrative comparison the table below also contains the performance results of the Serial ATA RAID controller implemented in the NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra chipset:

As the numbers show, Serial ATA interface of the nForce4 is much faster than that of the VIA K8T890 solution. In fact this is not a surprise for us, keeping in mind the architectural differences between the chipsets we consider. The Serial ATA controller in the NVIDIA chipset features “dual-channel?architecture. Moreover, it is located much “closer?to the CPU, because there are no busses connecting the chipset bridges. The Serial ATA performance of the VIA K8T890 chipset is limited by a number of factors, including the major one: the V-Link bus on the way from the Serial ATA controller in the chipset South Bridge to the system CPU.