ASUS SK8V
| ASUS SK8V | |
| CPU Support | All Socket 940 processors, including 1xx, 2xx and 8xx Opterons, and all Socket 940 Athlon FXs |
| Northbridge | VIA K8T800 |
| Memory Support | 4 slots, DDR400, 8GB max, dual-channel |
| AGP | 8X |
| Southbridge | VIA VT8237 |
| Audio | Analog Devices SoundMax AD1985 from VT8237 feed |
| Audio Connectivity | 3 port backplane speaker (autosensing), S/PDIF coax I/O on backplane |
| PCI | 5 x 32-bit 33MHz PCI 2.1 slots |
| IDE | 2 ATA133 compliant ports from VT8237, 1 port from Promise PDC20378 |
| IDE RAID | RAID0, RAID1, RAID0+1, JBOD from Promise PDC20378 |
| SATA | 2 ports from VT8237, 2 ports from Promise PDC20378 |
| SATA RAID | 2 drive, RAID0, RAID1 from VT8237. 2 drive RAID0, RAID1, RAID0+1, JBOD from Promise PDC20378 |
| Networking | 3Com 3C940 Gigabit Ethernet LOM, ASUS WiFi 802.11b slot |
| USB | VT8237, 4 x backplane USB2.0, 4 x I/O USB2.0 |
| FireWire | 1 x backplane port (6-pin), 1 x I/O port (4-pin) from VIA VT6307 |
| Other I/O | PS/2, Parallel, 1 x Serial |
To save you the checking back and forth with K8V, the SK8V does offer slightly better features. It has Analog Devices' AD1985 instead of the AD1980, the 1985 adding autosensing to the speaker ports on the backplane and slightly different software for its control. Functionally it's identical however. You also get a I/O backplane-mounted FireWire port, to complement the port on the ATX I/O port cluster.
The support for Socket 940 and the dual-channel processors that reside in it mean four DIMM slots and a slightly changed layout, but more on that in upcoming pages.
As far as the features go, it's slightly better than the packed K8V, with four SATA ports, all with RAID functionality attached, eight USB2.0 ports, six possible ATA devices for older hard disks and optical devices and the aforementioned high quality audio solution from Analog Devices.
Quite the power user's board in terms of features, the high-end processor support sees it further elevated into the AMD64 stratosphere, over K8V.
Good stuff so far, let's see how ASUS carry that over into the bundle and presentation.
