Introduction
Athlon FX's rightful enthusiast home?
In February I reviewed the ASUS K8V motherboard and declared it "A strong board, definitely one for your shortlist. The cost of the bundled GeIL in the Wireless Edition gets a point knocked off for pointlessness. If you run Opteron or Athlon FX, look out for the SK8V version with Socket 940".
Since then I've been using the K8V as my benchmarking base and also in my personal workstation, such is its quality, feature set and stability. I now know more than a few enthusiast friends with K8Vs, by virtue of those traits.
I added at the end that Athlon FX and Opteron users should keep an eye out for the Socket 940 version of K8V, the SK8V. Given that ASUS' own SK8N motherboard for Socket 940, powered by NVIDIA nForce3 150 Pro, was such a buggy disappointment, it stood to reason that SK8V would be a decent choice for those looking to buy ASUS for their Opteron or Athlon FX, given K8V's showing.
So when ASUS offered SK8V for review, I could hardly turn it down since my desire to see if it lives up to its K8V sibling was strong. Let's take a closer look.
