Articles: Mainboards

ABIT KV8-MAX3 Socket754 Mainboard Review (page 11) [01/22/2004 11:17 PM | Mainboards]
by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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Performance

In our today’s tests we are going to check out the performance level of ABIT KV8-MAX3 mainboard against the speed of typical and popular Socket754 mainboards. We will see if the engineering team from ABIT made the mainboard efficient from the performance point of view and learn how it ranks among other mainboards for the Athlon 64 processor.

The testbed was configured as follows:

AMD Athlon 64 3200+ processor;
ABIT KV8-MAX3, Gigabyte GA-K8NNXP, ASUS K8V Deluxe, MSI K8T Neo mainboards;
2x256MB DDR400 SDRAM from OCZ (2-2-2-5 timings);
ASUS RADEON 9800 XT graphics card (Catalyst 3.10);
2 x Western Digital Raptor WD360GD HDDs in RAID 0 array.

The testbed was controlled by Microsoft Windows XP SP1; the BIOSes of the mainboards were set up for maximum performance.

The benchmarking results in various applications are listed below:

	ABIT KV8-MAX3	Gigabyte GA-K8NNXP	ASUS K8V Deluxe	MSI K8T Neo
Business Winstone 2004	23.3	23.6	23.2	23.2
Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004	29.6	29.0	29.3	29.1
3DMark03, Default, CPU score	730	728	720	719
3DMark03, Default	6476	6425	6472	6468
3DMark2001 SE, Default	20541	20382	20360	20375
Quake3 (four), High Quality, 1024x768x32	379.3	383.2	376.9	377.8
X2 - The Threat, 1024x768x32	120.12	112.56	117.82	117.91
Unreal Tournament 2003 (dm-antalus), 1024x768x32	84.83	85.71	84.94	84.56
Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness (paris3), 640x480x32	164.6	160.2	163.7	163.8
MPEG-4 Encoding, FlasK 0.78.39/DiVX 5.11, fps	36.63	36.38	35.98	36.03
Data Compression, 7zip 3.11, 32MB, Compressing	3266	3274	3235	3234
Data Compression, 7zip 3.11, 32MB, Decompressing	2103	2104	2103	2103

As you see, ABIT KV8-MAX3 performs just brilliantly. It is faster than other popular Socket754 mainboards on the same chipset (VIA K8T800) as well as those on the NVIDIA nForce3 150 chipset. So, the engineering team from ABIT did a good job optimizing the product for better performance.

Conclusion

The new mainboard from ABIT, KV8-MAX3, is a unique product. However, “unique” doesn’t mean “good”. The mainboard left me doubtful. On the one hand, it is really fast, stable and features that uGuru technology, but these advantages are counterbalanced by some problems with the Cool’n’Quiet technology implementation, by the inconvenient PCB design and by the difficulties with CPU overclocking. I should confess, though, that we haven’t yet seen any Socket754 mainboard to satisfy us fully. Overall, ABIT KV8-MAX3 has no fatal disadvantages, and we use this very mainboard as a testbed for Athlon 64 family processors.

Highs:

Excellent performance;
Two integrated SerialATA RAID controllers that support up to 6 SATA hard disk drives;
Support of Gigabit Ethernet and IEEE1394;
Stylish exterior;
Hardware data encryption system aka SecureIDE;
Integrated POST controller;
ABIT uGuru technology.

Lows:

Problems at overclocking processors as you cannot control the AGP/PCI frequencies;
Difficult to install a massive CPU cooler;
Useless and noisy OTES technology;
PCB design issues.