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ABIT AV8-3RD EYE Contents
The original AV8 has been around for a few months and as such the natural progression of the AV8 the AV8-3rd eye is based on an AGP chipset, the VIA K8T800 Pro for Athlon 64 CPU's (Socket 939). You may think that this is old technology and not worth spending your money on. Some truth is in the fact that PCI express cards are increasing in their market share but AGP still has the majority of cards and probably will have for the next couple of years while the changeover takes place. After all you wont be chucking away your brand new Geforce 6800 AGP just so you can move over to PCI Express. This is why there is still call for motherboards such as the ABIT AV8-3rd eye. The ABIT AV8-3rd eye features 1AGP slot, 5 PCI slots for expansion cards, 2 ATA-133 ports, 2 S-ATA ports, Firewire, 6 channel audio with optical output, Gigabit LAN and or course USB ports. The Memory slots are for DDR DIMMs up to DDR400. The maximum memory size is 4Gb in 4 DIMM slots but there are condition to be met before you can reach this maximum. If you are using single channel DIMM's then you can only use 2 of the DIMM slots and have a maximum memory size of 2Gb. When using dual channel DIMMs you will be able to use the full 4 slots and acquire the full potential of the board with 4Gb of memory.
When purchasing the ABIT AV8-3rd eye like when buying all motherboards make sure to check the BIOS revision and find out which particular CPU core your board will take before buying. With a BIOS update this board will take the latest in 90nm core from AMD. Some later revisions will have this already installed others will need a BIOS flash before it accepts them. The retailer will be able to answer these simple questions for you.
This a neat little device that again proves that ABIT is after the overclockers in the market. The Guru clock connects to your PC via the USB cable and reads the BIOS reports on System specs such as clock speed, Fan speeds and temperatures. It also displays the room temperature and the current time just as an added bonus. The real beauty of this device however is its ability to be able to change the settings for overclocking without the need for a windows program or you entering the BIOS. Once you set up all the software you can alter these settings even while you are in the middle of playing your favourite game. If you need that little extra from your system while immersed in your game, you can use the buttons on the back of your guru clock to turn up the power and cool down the competition. As always beware that overclocking too far can damage system components. Always keep track of your hardware temperatures and watch out for signs from your system that it is under stress such as random restarts or pixel problems in your games. If this is not enough for you how about it does even more than just the overclocking and system performance part of your PC. I've already said that the Guru Clock tells you the time and the room temperature as extra's, but it goes further, when set-up correctly the guru clock will alert you when you have incoming mail and MSN messages so you can alerted of this when you are playing games, or even when your monitor has switched of and is in standby. A neat little device that you may well expect to pay for, but its all bundled in the 3RD-EYE products from ABIT
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 Flash menu. This little feature allows you to download updated BIOS' from the internet and then helps you to install them.
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. Dual Channel DDR400 With speed hungry CPU on the market, its essential that memory doesn't become a system bottleneck. With this in mind, Dual channel DDR RAM is being mass produced. Dual channel is exactly what is says on the tin, it transmits data on an extra channel, providing the chipset and CPU are compatible the data rate is effectively double from standard DDR RAM. 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
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