Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C., November 4th 2003 - Number
One enthusiast hardware site HardOCP.com has, after extensive testing
and comparisons, running the board through all available paces, produced
a review of the ABIT KV8-MAX3.
 "ABIT
has been renowned in the enthusiast crowd since even before the good old
days of the Celeron 300a. ABIT's commitment for taking the overclocking
experience to the next level is legendary, as witnessed by their past
achievements like the SoftMenu interface, and their current breakthrough
technologies including OTES and uGuru."
"The KV8-MAX3 is ABIT's latest MAX family addition, bringing
both the OTES cooling and uGuru technologies to the table. ABIT chose
to design this board around the VIA K8T800 chipset. The chipset boasts
support for the AMD Athlon64 754-pin line of processors as well as DDR
RAM specified to speeds of PC3200 in Single Channel mode. The KV8-MAX3
is a feature complete solution, as is the rest of the MAX line, including
the following built in features: 2 ATA-133 ports; 2 SATA-150 ports with
built-in RAID0 and RAID1 support through the VIA VT8237 Southbridge chipset;
4 SATA-150 ports with built-in RAID0, RAID1, and RAID0+1 support through
the Silicon Image RAID controller; 8 USB 2.0 capable ports (4 in rear
panel, and 2 onboard headers supporting 2 ports each); 3 IEEE 1394a capable
ports (1 in rear panel, and 2 onboard headers supporting 1 full sized
and 1 mini port); 3Com Gigabit Ethernet; Realtek 6 channel audio featuring
S/PDIF optical input and output ports; and PS/2 port support."
Morry's Thoughts:
"Out of all the K8T800 solutions I've tested so far, the KV8-MAX3 is my
favorite. The board was a piece of cake to setup and get running, with
only a few issues encountered when attempting to mount my Athlon64 Alpha
HSF to the board. The board definitely lives up to the MAX moniker, with
its performance matching or beating other Athlon64 solutions and in most
cases burying the P4 i875P solutions."
Kyle's Thoughts:
"ABIT has been impressing me more and more lately. The KV8-MAX3
worked exactly like it should have from the moment we first turned it
on. It supplied us with an incredibly fast system that was solid as a
rock.
"If you can handle being out there on the cutting edge computer
technology, I think it is going to be harder to find a better all around
package than what is offered in ABIT KV8-MAX3 for the Athlon64 platform."
For the full review, click
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTM5LDE=
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