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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: |
Hardware Bundle
Aside from the documentation, an important, though often neglected aspect of any mainboard concerns the software included and the format thereof. What we are referring to here is not the bundling of a 5'n dimes variety store selection of useless downloads or trial samples. Rather we are talking about the drivers and utilities CD, its autorun and install shield which really separates the wheat from the chaff. Even more important is the presence or absence of a floppy with the necessary SATA drivers; as obsolete as it may appear in the day and age of legacy-free systems, Microsoft still requires a floppy for the initial installation of their operating systems if a third party controller such as the SiliconImage SATA RAID controller used here is used as storage interface. ABIT includes the necessary floppy and gets honorable mentioning for that.
Compared to the software and documentation, the description of the hardware bundle is rather short. The bundle does not encompass any excessive fat like the proverbial and proverbially useless smart card readers and the likes, rather we are looking at an intelligent selection of the necessary and the necessary only. Amongst the most useful items, in particular for dealing with SATA RAID are the SATA power connectors in form of a Y-splitter, accessories that really become invaluable if, in fact, four SATA drives are being used - which are supported by the SiliconImage SiI 3114AR controller that is integrated on the mainboard.
If there is power-supply for four drives and connectors for four drives, the next missing link in the true sense of the word would be the data cables. Ergo, ABIT bundles no less that four of them as well. On a side note, an emerging issue with SATA CabCon (cabling and connectors) is the loose fit and consequently, the tendency to come lose of quite a few third-party cables. In the case of a RAID-0 setup, the consequences can be catastrophic since a single bad contact suffices to invalidate some data on one drive which will then destroy the entire RAID scheme of both drives. The four SATA cables provided by ABIT, at least in their initial use, do not appear to be prone to such problems, the fit is snug and there appears only a very remote chance of any of them coming lose.
For the conservative users sworn to PATA, ABIT further includes a set of rounded cables and, again, the quality used has to be commended since the cables are not the cheap slice and roll variety but actually use twisted pair routing to avoid cross talk. Needless to say that for reasons of consistency, even the floppy cable is rounded. Unfortunately, that one is a bad move as we will discus a bit later. IEEE1394 firewire fans as well as those who endeavor in excessive use of USB will cherish the additional backpanel header featuring two ports each of the just mentioned.
The OTES wind tunnel interferes with the mounting space for the CPU.
OTES
Predominant hardware feature of the KV8-MAX 3 is the wind-tunnel covering the CPU power supply dubbed OTES. Unfortunately, in this case, the entire arrangement is overly bulky and, for users of cases with proprietary standoffs, it is in the way of proper mounting since the fastening screws for the wind-tunnel use the same mounting holes that are usually dedicated to secure the top edge of the mainboard. In general this is a neat idea since it allows simple alignment of the board in the case and just fastening of the screws without the need for threading them between the PSU and other components - alas, every rule has its exception and in the case used for testing here, we had no choice but to take off the entire setup altogether. As it turned out, this move also greatly facilitated the mounting of the CPU cooler. Related to OTES, the AGP tunnel is equipped with an active cooler, which, fortunately enough is not noisy. I would still think that a passive cooler is preferable, certainly in the context of reliability.
KV8 MAX3 ships without retention mechanism and without back plate. Luckily this did not constitute a major problem since we had spares. However, mounting of the HSF revealed the next problem in the form of the capacitors used to buffer whatever residual ripple currents are left over from the VRM. As a consequence, any standard Athlon64 cooler can only be mounted with the tension curb pointing towards the South side of the board, which makes it a bit cumbersome to engage the other tab by means of a screwdriver in a very narrow space between the retention bracket and the VRM capacitors. It is a solution one can live with but it is not a great solution.
next page: => VRM, General Layout =>
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