Price Guides August 2004: CPUs and Motherboards

Via seems these days to only really make any waves in the A64 world ever since NVIDIA took over the Socket A arena. Thankfully, VIA is doing a very good job of producing chipsets for A64's and they're doing so at very good prices to boot. So, if you're looking for a motherboard to go with your shiny new A64 then look no further than Asus' K8V SE Deluxe. This board has every bell and whistle you could ask for including support for 10 hard drives (4 SATA, 6 PATA), firewire, gigabit LAN and more. One really nice feature found so far only on this board is the Marvell VCT, or virtual cable tester. This tool is extremely useful if you go to a lot of LAN parties since it can detect cable faults and mis-wiring on its own. Simply plug in the cable, launch the utility, and it will tell you exactly what's wrong with the connection making for an easy troubleshooting method and an easy fix. We can only hope that more motherboard manufacturers will include this feature down the road.