Presentation and bundle
By very definition, socket-939 caters for a premium market. You won't processors for £50 here. It makes little sense, then, to release a budget motherboard. ASUS knows this and has laden the A8V Deluxe down with sought-after extras.
The presence of a WiFi (54g-compliant, incidentally) manual and driver disk shows that ASUS is prepared to push the features boat out this time. A healthy collaboration with InterVideo sees the inclusion of the Platinum WinDVD Suite range of software. WinDVD 5 (6-channel), WinDVD Creator 2, and WinRip 2 all add value to the package. ASUS' instruction manuals are amongst the best in the business; this one is no different. We're confident that a novice user could get the board up and running in no time. Naturally, ASUS includes all the drivers necessary for chipset and features installation. There's also the usual black ASUS-branded IDE cables, an irregular I/O shield, two brackets that house 2 USB2.0 and a single FireWire400 port.
ASUS WiFi-g@Home runs off the PCI bus and provides up to, as the name suggests, 802.11g operation. From personal experience, that infers a real-world transfer rate of ~25Mbps. Installation is a cinch with a one-touch software setup. Like most add-on cards, it supports a variety of modes, ad-hoc, bridging, soft access point, and the regular infrastructure. The recent proliferation of cable / ADSL modems and routers makes this an especially good feature. Networking is high on ASUS' priorities list, obviously.
It's nice to have a wireless connection straight out of the box. ASUS' omni-directional aerial provided signal quality that's at least as good as my Dell Inspiron 8600's.
