Asus has been catering to the needs of enthusiasts for quite some time now, and thus far they have succeeded in delivering some of the best user-friendly boards to the market. The fact that Athlon 64 754 platform isn't an overclocker friendly platform of choice shouldn't matter much to value users. Despite its drawbacks, it's still a great platform for budget users. This week, we have already evaluated three Athlon 64 754 boards and quite honestly the performance from one board to another is within five percent, if even that, is most cases. Of course we are talking about boards based on the KT800 chipset and not the KT800 Pro or NVIDIA's 250 and 250Gb chipsets. Once you start moving up the chipset chain, the performance goes up significantly. With performance goes up the price, which still is a great value for socket 754, but the counterparts to KT800 aren't as affordable as some of us would like them to be.

The future of socket 754 is pretty much set. AMD has made the announcement to move forward with socket 754 as its official platform of choice for budget systems. Obviously enough, the future of socket 754 will be combined with a plethora of Sempron chips that are designed to replace the Athlon XP. That being said, even the value system can provide extensive performance for regular day-to-day tasks that not only includes web browsing and word processing, but also gaming. For those of you who are looking for an inexpensive gaming system will also be impressed with what socket 754 have to offer.

Asus boards are not only overclocking friendly, but stable and inexpensive in many cases. The inexpensive part usually depends on the onboard features you want. Since many high-end boards from tier one-motherboard makers have unimaginable peripherals, many uses prefer to purchase a downgraded version, as they never tend to use everything that the board has to offer. This is where the economy class of high-end boards comes in. As you are already aware, almost all motherboard makers offer two or three versions of the same board. The only difference between one version from another are the onboard features. Companies usually cut down on features to reduce the board cost, thereby, suggesting the same board as both a value board as well as the enthusiast, high-end board. The interesting thing to notice is that all two/three versions of the same board carry the exact same BIOS features, so the difference in tweaking is far to none.

Asus currently offers three K8V products: K8V, K8V-X and K8V-SE Deluxe. As you can guess, the K8V is the low-end board of the line; K8V-X is the mid-end board while the K8V-SE Deluxe takes the top crown in its line-up. The K8V-X promises an impressive performance with rock solid stability and possibly even overclocking and tweaking options. How well does it stack up against its class of KT800 chipset? What about the performance against KT800 Pro, NVIDIA 250, and 250Gb chipsets? Read on and find out

Looking for more motherboards, check out Newegg.com for more choices.