The integrated sound of the ASUS A8V-E Deluxe is implemented via the Realtek AC97 codec ?ALC850. This eight-channel sound codec is one of the most popular solutions today and is almost always used on the mainboards based around NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra chipset. This codec complies with the AC97 2.3 specification and supports Universal Audio Jack technology (it implies that the audio output ports can be reassigned according to the devices connected to them). I should point out here that the mainboard rear panel carries six audio-jacks, an optical and a coaxial SPDIF output ports.

Despite the fact that NVIDIA based Socket 939 mainboards are also equipped with the Realtek ALC850 sound codec, the sound implementation on the ASUS A8V-E Deluxe mainboard is very much different from the integrated sound like that on nForce4 based mainboards, which we have already discussed in great detail in our previous articles. The thing is that all nForce4 based products are bundled with NVIDIA?s own drivers. In this case the ALC850 codec goes with Realtek?s own driver software.

This fact alongside with the different implementation of the AC97 tract on the chipset level do affect the sound quality a lot. During the practical testing we carried out, the sound system of the ASUS A8V-E Deluxe mainboard scored as follows:

General performance: Good

This way, even though the codec is the same as the one used on NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra based mainboards, the sound provided by ASUS A8V-E Deluxe appears a way better. Actually, this is one of the major advantages of VIA K8T890 compared with the rival from NVIDIA.

All eight USB 2.0 ports supported by the VIA K8T890 are laid out on ASUS A8V-E Deluxe. Four ports are available on the mainboard rear panel, another four ports are represented by the onboard pin-connectors. The mainboard is supplied with a special rear panel bracket with two additional High Speed USB 2.0 ports. So one of the USB pin-connectors remains free and can be used for the USB ports of your case.

One of the greatest disadvantages of the ASUS A8V-E Deluxe mainboard is very unstable functioning of the USB ports in USB 2.0 mode. As we found out later, this issue occurs only with this particular mainboard. Other mainboards based on VIA K8T890 chipset have pretty functional USB 2.0 ports. With ASUS A8V-E Deluxe we failed to use the available USB 2.0 ports properly: the mainboard refused to recognize them for some reason. All regular USB devices work just fine on this board, however.

Therefore, we had to use another mainboard based on the VIA K8T890 chipset in order to evaluate the performance of the USB 2.0 controller implemented in the chipset. We took Albatron K8X890 Pro (the review of this mainboard is coming out soon). With the help of AIDA32 utility we measured the USB bus bandwidth and CPU utilization, when the USB bus is used to address USB 2.0 Maxtor OneTouch 250GB HDD. For a better comparison we measured the same performance in the NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra based platform:

As we see, USB 2.0 bus of the VIA K8T890 is much slower than that of nForce4, especially when the data is transferred from the chipset to an external device. So, it looks like we are not going to say anything highly positive about the VIA K8T890 chipset.