K8V SE Deluxe - any good??

  • Thread starter Thread starter Richard Milser
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Richard Milser

Hi all - looking to build myself Athlon64 pc. Researching motherboards and
this seems to get a pretty good overall writeup. What do users of the board
think?? Any major problems? Not too concerned re overclocking. Stability,
design, ease of use important.
Have looked at MSI and Abit boards to- any comments?

Thanks
Richard
 
Hi all - looking to build myself Athlon64 pc. Researching motherboards and
this seems to get a pretty good overall writeup. What do users of the board
think?? Any major problems? Not too concerned re overclocking. Stability,
design, ease of use important.
Have looked at MSI and Abit boards to- any comments?

Thanks
Richard
Click to expand...

Using the K8V SE Deluxe board myself with the 3200 64bit cpu, and I've not had
any major issues.

To be honest.. I'm not too keen on the Ami bios, I prefer the Award bios, but no
big deal... it does the job well enough.
I have not been able to get the onboard speech diagnostics to work when booting,
but I suspect that's down to the fact I have a SB Audigy LS board plugged in or
simply down to user error :-)) I've not pursued this much as I'm not bothered
about this feature myself.

Its certainly been very stable so far (about 3 weeks old) I moved up from a
Epox 8RDA+ and 2800 barton and the increase in performance is noticeable.
3dmark2001 scores went up from 16500 to 20000. Having the Sata drives gives a
little extra transfer speed too.

I've read that some of the first batch of the boards were afflicted with poor
capacitors, but mine was not one of them :-)) (they now fit different
capacitors) info on Asus site.

Design wise... I've found it okay...nothing critical that I can think of,
although I noted the main power connector is a third way down near the right
edge instead of the more usual top left position above the cpu, but I didn't
find this an issue. Plenty of room around the Agp slot... ie. no need to
remove memory before you can remove the video card.

The 2 x 512megs of memory I had in the 8rda+ was Twinmos Pc3200 and it works
fine in this board.

Currently running the FSB at a cumfy 210 instead of the default 200. I have
found that my ATI 9800 pro can give the odd corrupted graphics occasionally if I
push the FSB above 215. (Buses are not locked)

HTH

Regards

John
 
Hi all - looking to build myself Athlon64 pc. Researching motherboards and
this seems to get a pretty good overall writeup. What do users of the board
think?? Any major problems? Not too concerned re overclocking. Stability,
design, ease of use important.
Have looked at MSI and Abit boards to- any comments?

Thanks
Richard
Click to expand...


Just one thing more.... Richard which I forgot to mention, although probably
nothing to do with the board.
The new 64bit cpu's run very cool! mine never goes over 38c and that's with
the standard AMD heatsink. (usually between 34c and 36c) Try and go to 3200 or
above as the 3000 only has 512k of cache, the faster cpu's have 1meg.


John
 
I have not been able to
get the onboard speech diagnostics to work when booting, but I suspect
that's down to the fact I have a SB Audigy LS board plugged in or simply
down to user error :-)) I've not pursued this much as I'm not bothered
about this feature myself.
Click to expand...

If it's like the K8V Deluxe then you have to connect the speakers to the
onboard sound output. It doesn't do anything in normal operation as the
BIOS disables the onboard sound when there is a sound card attached.
 
Running just the non SE Deluxe model myself. I upgraded from a 1.1 gig so of
course I saw a pretty decent jump in preformance with intesitive programs like
photoshop. (hmm this got a bit long so get comfortable)

The layout of the board is one of the best I've seen, they spaced the RAM
sockets far enough away from the AGP slot that you dont have to take out the
vid card to change out RAM. This is actualy a bit of a rare find with boards
that have this many extras put on it.

The SATA was a little confusing at first since the manual really didnt define
which was the Promise RAID controller and which was the VIA controller so it
took a lil to figure out the process in bios.

One thing in reguard to the SATA controller setup that I didnt care for was
that if you make the SATA the system drive and connect an ATA drive after the
fact (master on the primary IDE) the bios automaticly makes that the boot drive
(makes it something of a bitch when swaping drives around).

The only actual problem I ran in to is that this board is VERY picky about what
kind of RAM you use. I persoaly went with Corsair TWINX1024-3200LL after a
rather disasterous attempt with Mushkin. Also keep in mind with this board (and
others that use this chipset) that you can only use 2 of the 3 RAM slots if you
intend to use the 400mhz speed. With all slots filled it will only be able to
run at 333mhz max.

The bells and whistles on the board are pretty nice. The Firewire worked
without issue once the drivers were installed. USB 2 will however require SP1
to be installed before it'll work. The intergrated NIC (3com on mine, dont know
if the SE is different) is nice, I was able to ditch my 10/100 3com Card for
the gigabit. The intergrated sound isnt that bad from what I hear but 3rd party
sound cards still seem to beat it out.

When I was choosing boards I checked out the others (MSI, Gigabyte, Abit) and I
found that the Asus offered much more for the cash. I upgraded from an Abit and
while they are a good company, they tend to cater more to the overclocker crowd
and I was more intereste in running more devices on USB and Firewire which made
the Asus more attractive.

Something to keep in mind tho is that Asus has one of the worst response times
when it comes to customer support. I still havent gotten a reply to an email I
sent about 2 months ago when is was dealing with the Mushkin problem. Also if
your planning on running Linux some people have been saying there are issues
with the NIC with some Distros.

Hope this helps
 
- Very picky with RAM (even Mushkin is sometimes not accepted)
my Twinmos CAS 2.3 wasnt accepted either

- Sound problems.

- IDE HardDidk activity LED not working.
if you say the IDE LED is not important, then that's your opinion.

- Asus support is bad.
 
If it's like the K8V Deluxe then you have to connect the speakers to the
onboard sound output. It doesn't do anything in normal operation as the
BIOS disables the onboard sound when there is a sound card attached.
Click to expand...

Cheers Ian..

I've just tried plugging a pair of headphones into the line out (green socket)
from the onboard sound and it does indeed work,.. well... I heard this female
voice announcing the system was booting :-)) so it works, and obviously doesn't
get disabled if a sound card is plugged in. May be useful perhaps if one has
problems.

Regards

John
 
Cheers Ian..

I've just tried plugging a pair of headphones into the line out (green
socket) from the onboard sound and it does indeed work,.. well... I heard
this female voice announcing the system was booting :-))
Click to expand...

That's just in case you don't spot it happening... *8)
so it works, and
obviously doesn't get disabled if a sound card is plugged in.
Click to expand...

The voice chip and the sound device are seperate things. Even so the
voice working only proves that it might be enabled during POST and just
before boot. On my system while I know the sound chip is there is does
not show among the list of devices. This is because the BIOS disables it.

It's similar to the way it handles USB devices, eg keyboard. The BIOS
enables the keyboard so you can use it to access settings. However if you
do not have legacy USB enabled it disables them again just before booting
the system.
May be
useful perhaps if one has problems.
Click to expand...

It's certainly easier to understand than a series of beeps!
 
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