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| ABIT KV8 MAX3 Taking it to the streets | |
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(Review by MS, November 24, 2003) |
| KV8 MAX3 At: |
Summary
AFTER SOME INITIAL SKEPTICISM, the Athlon64 is showing that the Socket754 is not an ugly duckling after all, despite all attempts by AMD to hide it in the closet in favor of the Socket940 version. Less prestigious than the latter, less pricey as well and less ... well, it is really difficult to think of something other than theoretical memory bandwidth measurements in SiSoft Sandra.
It is no wonder, therefore, that we are seeing all kinds of mainboard suddenly popping up, amongst which are some really fine pieces of engineering - supposedly, they all had time enough to iron out the kinks before the release into the market, a novum, indeed. What we are looking at today combines some interesting monitoring, a wind tunnel and the Athlon64 to a regular powerhouse in the personal computing scene. Add 6 SATA channels and Gigabit LAN and a hell of a lot of LEDs and the result is called ABIT KV8 MAX3.
But what is really under the hood?
HARDLY has there ever been a platform as controversial as the Athlon64. Considered useless by many in the absence of true 64-bit mainstream operating systems, the predominant expectations amongst those defining the "Current Grain of Wisdom" were somewhat gloomy. Adding to the problem was the confusion about the nature of 64-bit in general and specifically, the compatibility with existing hardware - for example: Do I need to upgrade to 64-bit memory?
Enchanted by the raw power of the new systems and the prospect of a seamless transition into true 64-bit computing, there has still developed a tribe of followers even though, at least the current socket 754 appears rather short-lived after all. It is not a bad processor at all, the mechanical improvements in form of the heat cap alone are worth taking a second look and the performance leaves very little if anything to be desired as well. But then the question is, what chipset delivers the best support, or, by extension, which mainboard should it be for the new CPU to go with?
We already looked at the ASUS K8V, which, at the current state of technology offers almost anything the enthusiast's heart could desire, including very decent overclocking capabilities with the 1003 BIOS revision as well as integrated WiFi. There are other boards out there as well but one of the hottest items for the new platform is none else but ABIT's KV8 MAX3 with a wealth of extra features from OTES to 4 channel SiliconImage SATA support and last not least the mysterious µGuru and "Black Box" features.
next page: => At One Glance =>
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