Deluxe Wireless Edition Bundle
The second bundle is a little different, containing everything the first bundle did, with a couple of extras. The first is obviously the WiFi hardware. As mentioned on page two, it's a dual standard card, supporting both 802.11b and 802.11g. It plugs into the dedicated WiFi slot at the bottom of the board, which you then screw the antenna to. The antenna has a decent cable length, letting you site it a little way from the case your K8V will reside in. I wasn't able to test it properly, I have no other WiFi hardware, but Windows knew it was there and I was able to configure it without a problem. Here's a quick shot.
As you can see, it uses PCI5's space on your case. An interesting configuration issue crops up here. With an AGP card in place, you have five PCI slots available. If you use the extra USB2.0 ports, the extra firewire port, the S/PDIF ports and the WiFi card, that only leaves you with one slot for add-in cards. It constrains your upgrade path a little, depending on how much use you want to make of the bundled features. Something to look out for.
Opening the box shows you the second extra that the first bundle doesn't have, that the box shot at the top of this page will give away.
The green UV reactive plastic box contains a single 256MB stick of GeIL DDR500 (PC4000) memory, the leaflet for which you can see on the left, the sticker for which is on the box shot at the top. I've had the bundle for a couple of weeks now and I'm still struggling to account for its inclusion, bar a simple bundling deal ASUS have with GeIL. The latencies at DDR500 are CL=2.5, Tras=7, Trcd=4, Trp=4. Pretty good for high speed DDR, but a bit useless for Athlon 64. With no option to run a memory divisor that enables DDR500 speeds and zero chance of realistically running that driven clock natively, what's the point?
Testing the module in a motherboard that will happily run memory at DDR500, my trusty EPoX 4PDA2+, shows that it does indeed run 2.5-4-4-7 at DDR500 with 2.7V. It doesn't do 2-2-2-6 at DDR400 though, at any voltage. Only 2.5-3-3-6 was possible at DDR400, using 2.7V and above. It's capacity also does it no favours, 256MB isn't really enough for Windows XP or any other modern OS, being honest.
I'd have much preferred a bundled stick of their DDR400 memory, 512MB in size, that no doubt costs the same and would be much more useful. A curious inclusion and pretty useless. You'd either have to buy another matched stick, and why would you given the latencies it can run at DDR400, or use it in another machine. Shiny platinum coated heatspreader though.
Click for a picture of the box for the GeIL DDR500 memory (~24.5KB)
With everything else being equal in the Wireless Edition bundle, with the exception of an added manual for the WiFi card and aerial, it seems you have three bundle choices. The one described on the previous page, the previous page bundle and box along with the WiFi hardware, and finally the WiFi and GeIL memory bundle and box on this page.
Layout now.
