AMD's Socket 939 Offers More with Much of the Same

Asus A8V, Rev. 1.01

The A8V is a pre-release motherboard, which is easily seen by the bridge that Asus inserted (see photo below). When we tried to sort out the performance differences between Asus und MSI we found that Asus runs the V-Link between Northbridge and Southbridge a bit faster than MSI. However, the difference should usually hardly be measurable.

We were able to run the memory at CL2.0-2-2-6 at once, which has not been that easy with most Socket 754 Athlon64 solutions yet. In contrast to MSI, Asus included an option to change the processor multiplier from the word go.

A new BIOS version, 1003 Beta 0023, was supposed to narrow the performance gap between the A8V and the MSI motherboard, but did not change anything at all.