The Mother of boards for the 939 pin AMD 64 bit processors:

Asus has done it again with the A8V motherboard that has it all from 8-channel audio to even a version of this board with 802.11g wireless LAN. (This review is without the wireless LAN)

It seems AMD is going for a new 64-bit processor with 939 pins and will eventually do away with the 754 and 940 pin processors. The new AMD FX-53 processors will be 939 pins as well as their 64-bit processors; like the 3500 and 3800 processors out now.

[ [ [ What you get ] ] ]
The motherboard, two CDs, instruction booklet, and all kinds of cables for connecting drives and ports.

Prices range from around $129 (retail about $189) and up, so shop around; it is a high priced motherboard, but this is a premium motherboard.

[ [ [ The board ] ] ]
The motherboard is very well crafted with everything laid out in good placement.

A CPU - 939 socket for Athlon 64 and 64-FX processors that is made for 32 and 64 bit computing. A system-bus of 2000 MT/s.

The board has one 8x AGP slot and five PCI slots for expansion.

There are four 184-pin DIMM slots for up to PC 3200 DDR un-buffered memory with the dual channel architecture.

A built-in 8-channel sound for a great 7.1 sound system that will rock the house.

USB ports for up to 8 ports, it comes with everything four 4 USB ports, them you can connect four more from the motherboard.

The board supports, VIA 1394 Controller supports 2 x 1394 ports, 2 x UltraDMA 133/100/66/33, 2 x Serial ATA, support RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1, JBOD, and Multiple RAID.

The back side of the motherboard for the back of the computer has a PS/2 Keyboard port, PS/2 Mouse port, Parallel port, Serial port, four USB 2.0/1.1 ports, an IEEE1394 and 8-channel Audio ports.

[ [ [ Other Features ] ] ]
There are many other features that go along with this motherboard.

Over-clocking
Over-clocking is something I like that it is there, but myself I haven't used it. For those who want to try to get as much extra out of their AMD processor as they can, then ASUS has made it easy for you through the 4-megabyte AMI Flash-ROM BIOS with built-in over-clocking.

You can do things like increase the CPU voltage, increase the FSB, change the CPU multiplier and much more. (Be sure you know what you are doing if you plan to over-clock, because you can destroy your processor.)

Upgradeable
The ASUS A8V is a powerful motherboard that gives you plenty of room for now and down the road for upgrades. Upgrade to 4 megabytes of memory to various types of drives and communications.

Overall
I was very happy when I was asked to build a computer using this motherboard and an Athlon 64-3500 processor with 2 one-megabyte PC 3200 dual memory modules. This was an expensive computer for me to build consisting of over $1200 in parts, but it runs faster than any computer I have built.

The motherboard for me was easy to install, after installation of the whole computer, it ran beautiful. There was plenty of room when installing PCI cards between each other and the same with the four memory slots. The processor installed easily as well as everything else.

It is like buying a car, you pay little you don't get much, well a good quality motherboard like this costs a little extra, but I think it is worth it. Remember your motherboard and processor are the two most import pieces to buy that you can afford, because these two pieces run your system.

Bottom line, the guy who owns it now is very happy with my choice of using the ASUS A8V motherboard.