• Overview

• Software

• Motherboard Features

• Motherboard Specifications

• Useful links

Currently there are only 2 chipsets available for the Athlon 64. The K8T800 is one of them and ABIT's board using this particular chipset the KV8-MAX3. The KV8-MAX3 offers 3 DIMM slots for a maximum of 2Gb of memory. However bear in mind that you can only use 2 of the 3 memory banks when using the DDR400 modules. There is plenty of room for expansion with the KV8. 5 PCI slots is about standard these days as is the total of 8 USB ports (4 on back panel and 2 internal headers with a capacity for 2 USB ports on each. The real promise of expansion comes with the IDE and S-ATA devices. There is a standard 2 IDE connectors to connect up to 4 IDE devices. The south bridge handles 2 S-ATA devices and an extra onboard controller supports an extra 4 S-ATA devices giving you more room for storage expansion than many PC cases could possible hold.

Other features on the KV8-MAX 3 include a gigabit LAN chip. Although this is becoming the standard still many boards come with only a 10/100Mb LAN chip. Also onboard audio gives you 5.1 channel sound solution from Realtek.

In terms of cooling solutions ABIT has done a good job, they have gone for an active heatsink/fan on the north bridge, and although this is obviously going to be noisier than a passive solution, it is much more effective and an active solution has to be my choice even with the slight extra noise. The second part of motherboard cooling on the KV8 is the exhaust system on the capacitors near the CPU and North bridge. A small plastic case directs the heat away from the CPU and chipset and exhausted out of the system by a small virtually silent fan. The picture to the left shows you the position of the exhaust system. ABIT refers to this as the OTES cooling system.

Software

ABIT has integrated all of its clever software utilities into a single package. With the help of a hardware chip on the motherboard called the μGuru. The guru integrates the features such as the hardware guru, OC guru, smart BIOS flash, Black box and Audio EQ. You may be wondering why a hardware chip is required when its all software packages. Well as only ABIT motherboards support this software, ABIT have created a chip to handle all the processes of this software, this means zero CPU usage when you want to operate any of these features. This is great you can now monitor your system effectively without taking up any CPU cycles.

The EQ is ABIT's hardware monitoring program. You will find all the information you need on your system here, from temperatures to voltages and speeds. This is a standard information program to keep a close eye on the health of your system. This is the program where the zero CPU will bring the most benefit. People generally don't like to have them on all the time as they take up valuable resources. Unfortunately when maximised this program is very large on screen.

The OC guru is the overclocking utility. As you would expect this utility allows you to overclock your system from windows instead of having to do it the BIOS. You can increase the FSB of the CPU but the multiplier is locked on Athlon 64 CPU's. You can also adjust the voltage of the CPU, AGP and memory to get a faster and more stable system.

The Black box is a recovery program. The idea is that the black box stores your hardware configuration and system stats. Black box will send any problems to ABIT for analysis for them to have a look at and hopefully solve in a new BIOS release or software update. Admittedly, this is more for ABIT's benefit than ours but it will benefit us all in the end with better more stable motherboards on the products line.

The Audio EQ software is for you musicians and gamers or simply the music lovers. Its a little bit more than a equalizer. Audio EQ has support for all the major sound technologies such as EAX, A3D and Sensaura 3D. This gives you plenty of sound effects to play with as well as being able to configure your 5.1 sound channels the way you like them. Plus you can change your speaker setups should you not be using a 5.1 surround system.

Also present in the old favourite the Flashmenu. This little feature allows you to download updated BIOS' from the internet and then helps you to install them.

Motherboard Features

AGP 8x

Firstly it has AGP 8x support so you can fully utilize those latest graphics cards such as the Geforce FX and the Radeon 9800. This provides an AGP bus bandwidth of 2.1Gb/s instead of the 1.1Gb/s provided with the AGP 4x specification. With more and more complex textures coming into games the AGP bus speed is getting more and more important all the time as On-Card memory is not large enough to handle everything.

DDR400

The current fastest memory available DDR400. DDR400 also known as PC3200. DDR400 provides a 200Mhz*2 memory system. Remember the days of PC100.  In order to use the DDR400 memory you will need a CPU that supports 800Mhz FSB. Plus also note that you can only use 2 of the 3 banks when using DDR400 memory modules.

USB 2.0

USB 2.0 is up to 40 times faster than the standard USB1.1 ports. This is great news if you are using external Hard Disks CD-Drives or scanning large pictures on a USB scanner. with 480Mbs transfer rate there will be no slow down is your USB transmission.

Serial ATA Controller

Serial ATA is the new way of connecting your Hard drives to your Motherboard. The current Serial ATA specification is ATA-150 (150Mb/s). The KV8-MAX3 supports up to 6 S-ATA with support for RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 check out more on what RAID does here

Motherboard Specifications

Useful Links