With the Socket 754 now the mainstream platform for many, the boards that support this socket have fallen in price considerably. Although some of the boards were introduced back in September of 2003 with the Athlon 64 launch, these motherboards are equipped with some of the latest offerings and features that a mainstream user might want. Socket 754, at least with earlier boards, isn’t the most enthusiast friendly platform, but it definitely offers great performance at stock speeds. If you remember, majority of the boards were plagued with overclocking issues for one reason or another. Many of the socket 754 boards only managed to get around 225MHz on average, if not lower in certain cases. Even tier one motherboard manufacturers had problems introducing overclocking friendly motherboards at the time, but the gaming performance at stock speeds with 64-it chips was spectacle enough to undermine the overclocking issue. In fact, the term overclocking has a completely different meaning on socket 754 boards when compared to the average overclocks on Socket A and Socket 478 platforms.

Today we have Asus’ K8V-SE board that is designed for the enthusiast community in mind. If you remember our look at MSI’s K8T-FSR, the motherboard maker removed certain onboard features like additional support for IDE and SATA drives and RAID capabilities, but it’s not the case with K8V-SE. Considering that FSR was more or less an economy solution to budget buyers, we have high hopes for Asus’ K8V-SE board. Then again, when you consider the fact that K8V-SE was one of the earlier Socket 754 boards, you may have to think twice about what it can offer. At least from the surface, the board seems to have the perfect mixture of high-end features to tempt anyone looking to adopt a Socket 754 platform. Does it have what it takes to be the winner? Would it be able to perform against the best of the best? Read on and find out…

Looking for more motherboards, check out Newegg.com for more choices.

Next