Review: Stuart "Veridian3" Davidson
Editor/Design: Allan "Zardon" Campbell

 

Stability:

Over the last month of use the board has remained 100% stable despite a plethora of changes to the system. 6 different speeds and brands of DDR 2100 and DDR 2700 have been used on the board in both single and dual channel modes. Graphics cards from ATI and NVIDIA both ran without fault at AGP8X with all features (fastwrites etc) enabled. There was not one occasion in the testing period where the system had to be restarted for a hardware related issue.

When really being stressed the board was equally solid. One of the most intensive tasks you can perform with your PC is video encoding. Over the last 2 weeks we subjected the system to daily 4 hour test sessions (sometimes longer) of video encoding. This involved taking a DVD image on the hard drive in VOB format and converting it to a CD sized DivX video with MP3 sound. CPU usage during the process sits at around 100% constantly - IDE and memory are equally stressed. Not once in all the testing did the board hic-cup, let alone fail.

 

Conclusion:

In our Opteron review we were impressed by its performance and stability, whilst we are sure that the architecture as a whole is very good on the AMD 64-bit processors a good motherboard goes a long way to making a great system. The SK8V contributed greatly to our overall impression of the architecture and looking at the board on its own it is very difficult to fault. Originally it seemed a strange decision for ASUS to release a 2nd socket 940 board to what is essentially a limited marketplace at present. This put the already released SK8N from Asus in direct competition to the SK8V. Looking at the bigger picture, and the performance and features the SK8V provides this has proven to be a wise decision on the part of Asus.
Everything you could look for in a motherboard is present here. From all the connectors you could need to first class design and build quality. The retail bundle is also faultless also.

When writing this review we did not have additional socket 940 boards with which to compare the SK8V, having used the SK8V it seems that reviewing an additional product may have been a waste of time. This is, by quite a distance, the best motherboard we have had the pleasure of using, on any platform.

If you are in the market for a Socket 940 board, or its socket 754 equivalent then we see no need to look any further than the SK8V.

 

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