K8V Deluxe ... not!

[below0]

To vent some of my frustration with ASUS I decided to post to a few
places my review of a recently acquired K8V Deluxe AMD64 board. It
seems this is the only thing I can do since ASUS chooses to utterly
ignore all of my attempts at getting some sort of support. And this is
supposed to be a "deluxe", premium product. I pity those who buy just
the "regular" motherboard from this company.

On the surface the K8V looks good. I was initially pleased when I got
it, glancing at a nice looking board and spiffy accessories. This
feeling quickly dissipated. While the basic functions of the board are
acceptable (the CPU and memory do operate) the rest has a lot to wish
for.

The BIOS is full of useless features like "Instant Music" that lets
you play music CDs from the BIOS. I cannot fathom anyone actually
using this "feature". Add to this an ability to make the board "speak"
uselessly at startup and have a custom picture flash for 1/2 of a
second during boot. And to pay for all of these miracles you only need
to forget about being able to use both a PCI sound card and the
on-board sound (because the speaking BIOS does not like 2 sound
devices and automatically disables the on-board). Why would you need 2
Sound cards if you need to mix sound from more then one incoming
source when you can have the board speak in a mumbled voice "The
system is booted!!!". I mean that is the reason you paid for on-board
sound! No?

The board comes with 2 SATA controllers, one part of the VIA chipset
and the other a FastTrack 150 by Promise. Both can do cheesy
"software" RAID. The SATA cables that come with the board do not lock
onto the sockets so if you sneeze they will fall off the drives or the
MB. Add to this the fact that the HDD activity LED will not function
for the SATA drives unless they are in the RAID mode on the VIA
controller. So if you only have 1 SATA HDD, forget about the HDD LED.
Why would you need a functioning HDD LED which you will use nearly
each time your PC is on when you can turn your PC into a $2000
single-function CD-player once in a decade?! I mean one has to have
his priorities straight!

I use mostly Linux. There is a good driver in the 2.6 kernels for VIA
SATA and a lousy one for Promise SATA so I am not going to be using
the buggy driver and a secondary controller just for the sake of the
LED which should have functioned properly in the first place.

As to support, if you try to go to the ASUS "support" page using
Mozilla you will get a pretty error. SOL. The ASUS attitude is "Use
what we tell you: IE". If you are strictly a Windows user you might
not notice this but it is a major pain for me and I assume my money is
the same color as someone's who uses Microsoft products. Yet I am to
be put in the doghouse. Note that K8V is an AMD 64 board and thus most
likely to be used by the Linux 64-bit crowd.

Luckily, to make me feel more equal, ASUS placed the support forums in
Taiwan and put them off-line for a good measure. The FAQ is laughable.
Web based support form is redirected straight into a trashcan.

In summary, a lot of annoyances compounded by a total lack of
commitment on the part of ASUS leads to a very unpleasant experience
completely at odds with ASUS' (at this point in my opinion rather
undeserved) reputation.

 

[rstlne]

WOW..
How old are you, 15? 16?.. If not then I can only guess that you led a verry
sheltered life.

The "Deluxe" is because it's better than the standard.. It doesnt really
give you any special privvy's..

The systems do fine with onboard sound & add in sound cards (I doubt that
the K8V would go back in time and start woking like a 486 packard bell)..

you got "cheezy" raid..
What do you expect.. You think they are going to shove LOW end (800$) raid
hardware on there. I would think they do it as cheaply as possible while
still keeping the spec true to what you buy.


You dont want your system saying it booted properly.. FINE.. Turn off the
post reporter..

It sounds to me like you have a few other issues,
1) You bought top line tech and you dont fully understand what you got
yourself into
2) You bought the Deluxe version when you needed the standard version
3) You dont understand how to set up the bios..

As for tech support, My emails have got a prompt reply from ASUS every time
I tried.. I know lots of other people have troubles but if you compare to
someone like say MSI (Offer's a 3 year warranty that's only 1 year but they
dont honor that as the retailer should deal with you for 1 year) or other
companys..

Your buying into the MASS market of products and to be honest if there are
problems then it would probably be documented.. the A64's are not brand
spanking new and chances are that any problems with this would have been
found (or at least talked about) by now. If your research was lacking then
so be it.

 

[Wolfgang S. Rupprecht]

I use mostly Linux. There is a good driver in the 2.6 kernels for VIA
SATA and a lousy one for Promise SATA so I am not going to be using
the buggy driver and a secondary controller just for the sake of the
LED which should have functioned properly in the first place.

The "k8v deluxe" was already hard to get with "out of stock", and
"discontinued" notices at most of the online places I frequent. I
picked up the "k8v deluxe se" instead. (Is "se" "second edition"? I
wonder why they just didn't rev the board itself and keep the
packaging the same?)

I'm typing this under NetBSD/amd64 on the K8V right now. For the most
part the things I care about "just work". The one thing that doesn't
work reliably and it may well be a netbsd problem, is the onboard
syskonnect ethernet. It continually hangs and I need to ifconfig down
and then up to get it to work again. I just stuck a spare SMC
DEC-TULIP based ethernet card in a pci slot and use that one instead.
I wish I could figure out if I need to RMA the card or look at the
driver. How is the ethernet on your board? Do you notice any hangs?

I haven't tried using the Promise controller yet. I assume it can be
used as a normal controller. That is all I wanted it for anyway.
Having only two IDE cables would have been kind of tight.

-wolfgang

 

[Marc]

(e-mail address removed) (below0) writes:

I'm typing this under NetBSD/amd64 on the K8V right now. For the most
part the things I care about "just work". The one thing that doesn't
work reliably and it may well be a netbsd problem, is the onboard
syskonnect ethernet. It continually hangs and I need to ifconfig down
and then up to get it to work again. I just stuck a spare SMC
DEC-TULIP based ethernet card in a pci slot and use that one instead.
I wish I could figure out if I need to RMA the card or look at the
driver. How is the ethernet on your board? Do you notice any hangs?

-wolfgang

Hi,

about your problem with the Yukon chip (ethernet), I found a bug on at
least 4 motherboards (K8V Se Deluxe only).

The content of the VPD memory is corrupt so the driver won't load
correctly at startup without a patch I made last week.

Are you OK to make some tests with my patch to confirm me you have the
bug ? (I only add a lot of display during driver loading using printk).
It will help me to convainct Asus that they made a mistake on this model
of motherboard and they have to publish a patch to solve it.

Marc.

 

[below0]

The "Deluxe" is because it's better than the standard.

No it isnt better then the inustry "standard". Unless the "standard"
means the gutter. That is my point.

The systems do fine with onboard sound & add in sound cards (I doubt that
the K8V would go back in time and start woking like a 486 packard bell)..

You can doubt all you want but that *IS* the case.

you got "cheezy" raid..

I mentioned it for a completeness sake. I dont use RAID and it wasn't
a criteria for buying the board.

You dont want your system saying it booted properly.. FINE.. Turn off the
post reporter..

Sure, if only that brought back the on-board sound I wouldn't be
talking here.

1) You bought top line tech and you dont fully understand what you got
yourself into

"Top line" tech is distinguished by the fact that it *works* as
advertised. I.e. the LED indicators work and the on-board sound works.
Its all I ask. I expect this much from "top line" tech. Some other
naive types even expect it from the "standard" version.

2) You bought the Deluxe version when you needed the standard version

You are telling me that in the "standard" version, LED and the
on-board sound works?

3) You dont understand how to set up the bios..

That is you who is clueless. Why did you reply to this post? Do you
have a K8V Deluxe? Did you *try* to get the on board sound working
with a second sound card? The bios has an "On board sound" setting
with "Enable" and "Disable" choices. Not much else you can do here. In
the "Enabled" state the BIOS still auto-disables on-board sound as
soon as a PCI sound card is installed.

As for tech support, My emails have got a prompt reply from ASUS every time
I tried..

It has been 5 emails and 2 attempts at the web-page based support
form. NOT A SINGLE REPLY.

I know lots of other people have troubles but if you compare to
someone like say MSI (Offer's a 3 year warranty that's only 1 year but they
dont honor that as the retailer should deal with you for 1 year) or other
companys..

I dont care if the People's Great Motherboard Works of China offer
stuff with 255 year warranty and then put you in jail when you want it
fulfilled. It is not who I bought the board from. I expect ASUS to
behave like it gives a damn. Thats all.

Your buying into the MASS market of products and to be honest if there are
problems then it would probably be documented.. the A64's are not brand
spanking new and chances are that any problems with this would have been
found (or at least talked about) by now.
If your research was lacking then so be it.

When I search for those specific problems *after knowing precisely*
what they are it indeed turns out they are known and unsolved. Try
this seaarch before you buy and you will get 10 thousand hits on
Google with all sorts of people having difficulty installing Windows
or some such. Same as any other motherboard. That is precisely
*because* it is a mass market product, conducting on-line research is
much more diffcult unless the problems with the product are
fundamental and apply to all users.

I wonder why did you reply to my post. Clearly you have nothing to add
execpt ad-hominem attacks and "I love ASUS" statements.

 

[Wolfgang S. Rupprecht]

about your problem with the Yukon chip (ethernet), I found a bug on at
least 4 motherboards (K8V Se Deluxe only).

The content of the VPD memory is corrupt so the driver won't load
correctly at startup without a patch I made last week.

Just to keep the newsgroup appraised, yes I'm seeing the same corrupt
read of the VPD eeprom as you saw.

I'm not sure that this is all of the problem though, since the eeprom
contents are mostly ignored in the NetBSD driver. I wonder if any
reads from the controller chip itself don't have a small, but
non-zero, probability of being corrupt.

-wolfgang

 

[below0]

How is the ethernet on your board? Do you notice any hangs?

I did not activate the on-board 3COM adapter yet, from what I have
seen on various groups its flakey and tends to quit under load. I dont
need a Gigabit lan (yet) so I am just using my old RTL8139 PCI card in
the meantime.

I haven't tried using the Promise controller yet. I assume it can be
used as a normal controller. That is all I wanted it for anyway.
Having only two IDE cables would have been kind of tight.

Oops. It is my understanding that the Promise Linux driver in 2.6
kernels does not support PATA port, only the 2 SATA ones. I tried this
already and no dice, the IDE port is useless. On the good news side,
some people on the kernel mailing lists are molesting the SATA driver
developer to put it in. No idea how long (if ever) this will take.

 

[Ian Hastie]

To vent some of my frustration with ASUS I decided to post to a few places
my review of a recently acquired K8V Deluxe AMD64 board. It seems this is
the only thing I can do since ASUS chooses to utterly ignore all of my
attempts at getting some sort of support. And this is supposed to be a
"deluxe", premium product. I pity those who buy just the "regular"
motherboard from this company.

On the surface the K8V looks good. I was initially pleased when I got it,
glancing at a nice looking board and spiffy accessories. This feeling
quickly dissipated. While the basic functions of the board are acceptable
(the CPU and memory do operate) the rest has a lot to wish for.

The BIOS is full of useless features like "Instant Music" that lets you
play music CDs from the BIOS. I cannot fathom anyone actually using this
"feature".

Agreed this is pretty much useless. I suppose it might serve some very
minimal purpose as a hardware test of some kind, but I doubt anyone
would really miss it.

Add to this an ability to make the board "speak" uselessly at
startup

Yes, it speaks. Usually only if something goes wrong, unless you
configure it to tell you when it is booting.

and have a custom picture flash for 1/2 of a second during boot.

I think this may be more to do with the video card. My old video card
would switch graphics modes between the different boot phases. This
would cause the display to blank out for a short while to resync. This
problem has vanished with the new video card.

And to pay for all of these miracles you only need to forget about being
able to use both a PCI sound card and the on-board sound (because the
speaking BIOS does not like 2 sound devices and automatically disables the
on-board).

This is nothing to do with the spoken POST message chip. More likely it
is the limitaions of MS Windows, or at least it's users. I would like
to see them correct this is a BIOS update, but to be honest it isn't a
priority for me. My add in card is a lot better then the on board.

Why would you need 2 Sound cards if you need to mix sound from
more then one incoming source

I'd be very surprised if the onboard sound was of especially high
quality. If you had a good reason to want that sort of function then
it'd make more sense to buy two good sound cards.

when you can have the board speak in a
mumbled voice "The system is booted!!!".

Sounds clear enough to me. Certainly understandable. BTW, I don't get
that message as I have it disabled!

I mean that is the reason you
paid for on-board sound! No?

I got onboard sound because these days you can't get a motherboard
without it. As far as I know all modern VIA south bridge chips support
sound. They probably also have ethernet capabilities too.

The board comes with 2 SATA controllers, one part of the VIA chipset and
the other a FastTrack 150 by Promise. Both can do cheesy "software" RAID.

Hardware RAID is very expensive. You wont find a single on motherboard
"RAID" chip that is anything other than software RAID.

The SATA cables that come with the board do not lock onto the sockets so
if you sneeze they will fall off the drives or the MB. Add to this the
fact that the HDD activity LED will not function for the SATA drives
unless they are in the RAID mode on the VIA controller. So if you only
have 1 SATA HDD, forget about the HDD LED. Why would you need a
functioning HDD LED which you will use nearly each time your PC is on

I haven't actually used the SATA seriously yet. I had PATA discs from
my old motherboard so I got an IDE controller card which is working very
nicely. Of course it doesn't light the LED either, but I don't really
miss it.

when
you can turn your PC into a $2000 single-function CD-player once in a
decade?! I mean one has to have his priorities straight!

You think these are somehow related?

I use mostly Linux.

Your most sensible comment so far! *8)

There is a good driver in the 2.6 kernels for VIA SATA
and a lousy one for Promise SATA so I am not going to be using the buggy
driver and a secondary controller just for the sake of the LED which
should have functioned properly in the first place.

The LED is not that important. Really, it isn't!

As to support, if you try to go to the ASUS "support" page using Mozilla
you will get a pretty error. SOL. The ASUS attitude is "Use what we tell
you: IE". If you are strictly a Windows user you might not notice this but
it is a major pain for me

Strange. I'm not sure what error you're talking about here. what URL
is it that you're having problems with?

and I assume my money is the same color as
someone's who uses Microsoft products.

It'll probably be a lot cleaner... *8)

Yet I am to be put in the doghouse.
Note that K8V is an AMD 64 board and thus most likely to be used by the
Linux 64-bit crowd.

There is, of course, the Windows XP 64bit Beta release. I've tried it,
but hardware support is somewhat limited, eg no AGP! Linux is way ahead
here.

Luckily, to make me feel more equal, ASUS placed the support forums in
Taiwan and put them off-line for a good measure.

When was that? I can usually get through it is quite easilly.

The FAQ is laughable. Web
based support form is redirected straight into a trashcan.

Never really needed either.

In summary, a lot of annoyances compounded by a total lack of commitment
on the part of ASUS leads to a very unpleasant experience completely at
odds with ASUS' (at this point in my opinion rather undeserved)
reputation.

So far my experience is that the product works well. It gives me what I
want, which is a reliable base for 64 bit computer running Linux, Gentoo
at the moment.

Of course if you want my opinion on my old motherboard, an Abit
KR7A-133R, well I'd not recommend it. Usable stability was only
possible with a specific BIOS memory setting. Even then it would fail
memtest86, not the RAM BTW, but the motherboard. It was also supposed
to have uniprocessor IOAPIC, but it never worked. That board really was
worth some angry ranting.

 

[below0]

This is nothing to do with the spoken POST message chip. More likely it
is the limitaions of MS Windows, or at least it's users. I would like
to see them correct this is a BIOS update, but to be honest it isn't a
priority for me. My add in card is a lot better then the on board.

No it isn't. As I indicated, I use mostly Linux. However in this case
the on-board sound system simply disappears from the PCI bus and thus
neither Linux nor Windows can see it. Linux has a handy "lspci"
command that lets you examine the listing of devices that report
themselves on the PCI bus. I obtained a confirmation from ASUS about
it which went along the lines of "yea, so it is screwed up. we will
let our R&D (ha!) know. too bad. go get 2 sound cards".

I'd be very surprised if the onboard sound was of especially high
quality. If you had a good reason to want that sort of function then
it'd make more sense to buy two good sound cards.

I need two cards for many reasons, one of them having to do with some
work I am doing on voice recognition, the requirements for the cards
are not very high and that is one of the reasons I chose K8V for its
supposed on-board AD1980 sound.

This also has to do with the principle of it. If we just accept this
kind of sub-standard half-assed design laying down and let the
manufacturers get away with this sort of attitude, we should get ready
for increasing abuse and disparity between what is claimed on the box
and what is actually delivered in working condition.

The LED is not that important. Really, it isn't!

I am used to having HDD activity LED. It is very useful in cases when
some process goes off the deep end and accesses the disk in copious
amounts. If your PC slows down, the LED can be a way to determine if
the slowdown is I/O related, etc etc. I *EXPECT* my "deluxe"
motherboard to come with such a common and basic convenience as a
functioning HDD LED. It is not enough that all the useful things are
being substituted with loads of "cutsey" crap like the BIOS jukebox,
now the last vestiges of any sort of hardware based diagnostics are
being removed without warning.

Strange. I'm not sure what error you're talking about here. what URL
is it that you're having problems with?

Just go to www.asus.com, choose North America, and then hit "Support"
button in the row of buttons up top.

When was that? I can usually get through it is quite easilly.

About the time I wrote the original message, about a week back.

I have to add that I finally managed to get to the ASUS support via
yet another web page (helpdesk.asus.com) which has some sort of
incident tracking on it. I received replies to my sound and LED
questions. The answer for the sound problem was essentially "too bad"
and for the LED problem "The HDDs are on different controllers ... so
there!", which I am still attempting to get clarified.

 

[Robbie303]

I have to add that I finally managed to get to the ASUS support via

yet another web page (helpdesk.asus.com) which has some sort of
incident tracking on it. I received replies to my sound and LED
questions. The answer for the sound problem was essentially "too bad"
and for the LED problem "The HDDs are on different controllers ... so
there!", which I am still attempting to get clarified.

Yes, the IDE activity LED problem is regarded by Asus as "too bad for
you"..... "we can't do anything about it"

I can't belief that Asus is ****ing K8V owners so hard.
Asus sucks !!!!!
"!!!THAT'S IT, MAN!!! KEEP THROWING THAT
HEAVY SHIT AT ME!!! THAT HEAVY SHIT!!!" _____
\ /\| | | |
\ / /|_|_|_|
\ \ |
( ( ) ) ( ) ) \_______/
( ( ( ( ) ) ) ) /______/
( ( )) ) ( ) ( ( ) / /
( (__.-.___.-.__) ) / /
/ ---._.---._.---\ / /
\|| '/ ' ||/ / /
||| (_ ||| / /
|| ///\\\ ||\______/ /
___/ ||||\__/|||||/ /
/ \ |||||||| / /
/ \ |||||| / _____/
READ THE FAQ: http://extra.newsguy.com/~abmefaq/
Don't upload more then 350MByte/week or ??MByte/day

 

[zim]

Yes, the IDE activity LED problem is regarded by Asus as "too bad for
you"..... "we can't do anything about it"

I can't belief that Asus is ****ing K8V owners so hard.
Asus sucks !!!!!

I don't have access to the parent post, but part of this seems to deal with
the K8V no hard drive LED issue. I got the runaround from ASUS as well. I
did read someplace else that if you use the Promise RAID controller (as
opposed to the VIA controller) you'll get HDD activity on the LED.
Supposedly you can run a single disk w/out RAID on this controller. I
haven't tried it yet. I might just go for a RAID0 config for speed and see
if that works out.

here is a post on amdmb.com where someone explained the difference to me:

http://forums.amdmb.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=309072

Hope this helps...would be curious to hear what ASSus finally says.


pk