Yepp tracerbullet. Board's working fine. The colour coding didn't work for me as there was very little light inside and I couldn't see properly. Plus, there were so many extra pins for no reason.
I just realized how radically different my asrock board was in terms of design. Everything was within easy reach on the asrock whereas on the A8V deluxe, it was a real b**ch to install some items.
First, the 24 pin split power connector on my antec neo HE 500W was not going in on the 20 pin mobo connector as a nearby capacitor was blocking the 4 pin split part. I had to bend and nudge it out of the way. (Was thinking of breaking the 4 pin connector apart at first. Glad I didn't.)
Then the PATA connectors were vertically above each other(unlike side by side like my asrock) so I had to pull them aside to prevent them from interfering.
The floppy connector was oriented parallel to the board so I had to do quite a bit of circus to fix it in. SATA ports were upside down on the board. Took me a while to figure out why they weren't going in.
I faced a lot of issues but most were due to the fact that I did not completely remove everything i.e. my HDDs, DVD drives, sound card were still attached to the cabby and bezel. So I had limited space to move around.
But I realized later that the cable clutter on the A8V deluxe was much less do to the positioning of most connectors around the periphery. Glad to have the extra molex connectors around from both boards(I don't trust the flimsy SATA power connectors. Can say the same for data cables also but no choice here.) Lots of BIOS options on the A8V unlike the Asrock but many I don't even need. The BIOSes are very similar though (looks like the asus and asrock design teams are sharing some stuff.)
All said and done, the system sprung to life when I powered it on. The BIOS detected the processor change.