ABIT KV8-MAX3 came later than most other offerings from other manufacturers. Although it came slightly later, it has equipped itself with very interesting functions that most boards do not. KV8 Max 3 is probably the first Athlon 64 board to implement the OTES (Outside Thermal Exhaust System) that first appeared on the ABIT Ti4200 graphics card and DiGiDice. Now it is on the KV8-MAX3. With the O.T.E.S, the MOSFETs and capacitors gets cooled down during extreme overclocking. Something that might interest you too is that ABIT KV8-MAX3 is the first Socket 754 board to include 6, you heard it right, 6 SATA ports supporting RAID, 4 is by SiliconImage Sil3114 and another 2 is supported by VIA 8237 south bridge. Seriously, I am not sure if you need 6 SATA ports. :)

Something that comes unique with ABIT KV8-MAX 3 is the Secure IDE. Secure IDE consists of a IDE connector to secure the data that is stored on the disk. SecureIDE connects to your IDE hard disk and has a special decoder; without a special key, your hard disk cannot be opened by anyone. Thus hackers and would be information thieves cannot access your hard disk, even if they remove it from your PC. On top of that, ABIT has integrated their new feature μGuru which basically supports an interactive way of managing your hardware monitoring, overclocking features. Other standard features on this board include USB 2.0, 1394, Gigabit Ethernet, 6 channel audio. Softmenu III includes an adjustable multiplier control.

The boards performance is pretty good and is in line with most of the VIA K8T800 chipset mainboard. It has a similar performance level to the Gigabyte equivalent and excels well in the 3DMark2003 benchmark. Despite a newer south bridge 8237, the IDE performance is needs some catching up to do with the SiS or ALi Ref Boards. In fact, I feel that the performance levels could still be tuned for better performance.

In terms of overclocking, we managed to bring the CPU up to 222MHz FSB at 1.6v, DDR 2.7v at CAS 2.5, 6-3-3 (8-4-4). Although we can POST at 226Mhz, it hung in Quake 3 test and remained unstable at that speed. One thing we note is that the board does not seem to support FIX PCI/AGP=33/66. The PCI/AGP speed is generated via a divider as explained in the Gallery 4. In this Oct 4 BIOS, we do not see a MAXMEMCLK setting which is available on most K8T800 boards which allows MEM to run ASYNC to CPU FSB. Although there is a multiplier control, it seems to be locked at 10 and there is no way we can adjust it. The voltage levels of the settings for Vcore, VDimm, VAGP is pretty wide and definitely helps in extreme overclocking.

Installation is pretty straightforward as the documentation is very clear of what is to be done.

Overall, I am very impressed with the boards functionality and overclockability options. It has all the necessary settings available, OTES to keep the capacitors cool. The uGuru also helps to manage the temperatures and overclocking within Windows. This is something that you would want.

Suggested Retail : ~ USD209 Online Pricing

Discuss & read more

Pros 好处:

• 6 Channel audio
• USB 2.0 
• Gigabit LAN
• 1394
• SATA RAID
• OTES
• SecureIDE
• 6 SATA RAID ports

Cons 坏处:

• No IDE RAID
• No Async fsb:memory modes
• No FIX PCI/AGP

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.

Product Excellence