Now let’s say a few words about the functions that are implemented on our ASUS A8V-E Deluxe mainboard via additional onboard controllers. First of all we should pay due attention to network interface. No wonder that ASUS engineers gave up the obsolete Fast Ethernet controller integrated into the VIA VT8237R South Bridge. They integrated a Marvell Yukon 88E8053 chip instead. You should already be familiar with this solution, because you can come across it on many i925/i915 based mainboards. The major peculiarity of this controller is its connection to the PCI Express x1 bus, which allows it to ensure practical data transfer rates of up to 1Gbit/s.

Let us compare the performance of this controller against that of the integrated network controller of the NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra. We used NTttcp utility from Microsoft Windows NT DDK to measure the controller performance. NVIDIA Firewall 2.0 was disabled throughout the test session:

As we see, Marvell Yukon chip provides better bandwidth than nForce4 Ultra. However, it loads the CPU heavier, especially if we compare it with what we see by nForce4 with the activated hardware ActiveArmor technology.

ASUS A8V-E Deluxe also supports wireless 802.11g standard with up to 54Mbit/s bus bandwidth. For this purpose they used a Marvell 88W8310 controller. The accompanying software allows using this controller in Ad Hoc mode as well as Infrastructure mode. Moreover, the device can also function as a software access point allowing up to 31 client connections.

In conclusion to our features discussion I would like to say that ASUS A8V-E Deluxe owes its two IEEE1394a ports with 400Mbit/s bandwidth to the TI TSB43AB22A controller. One of the ports is laid out on the mainboard rear panel, another one is represented as an onboard pin-connector. There is a special bracket for the case rear panel that is included into the list of accompanying accessories.