Closer Look: Features

Being a Socket754 mainboard, ABIT KV8-MAX3 supports all modern CPUs of the Athlon 64 family with a single-channel memory controller. It’s also quite clear that this mainboard will have no problems supporting the upcoming Athlon 64 3700+. Unfortunately, the 3700+ processor will be the fastest CPU for the Socket754 platform: faster ones will be designed for the Socket939. When purchasing a Socket754 mainboard, like KV8-MAX3, you should be aware that you will have limited upgrade options in the future. AMD is going to turn Socket754 into a socket for value CPUs like Athlon XP on the Paris core (256KB L2 cache and no x86-64 technology).

On the other hand, other processor sockets you see in the market today are in no better situation. The Socket478 from Intel will be soon substituted for the new Socket T, and the topmost processor to be installed into the Socket478 is going to be a Prescott with a frequency of 3.6GHz.

An important feature of modern Athlon 64 processors is Cool’n’Quiet technology: when the processor has little work to do, it can switch into a mode with low heat dissipation by reducing the frequency and voltage, and, accordingly, the noise from the CPU fan. This technology should be supported in the mainboard BIOS, and as you know from our previous articles, not all mainboard makers implement Cool’n’Quiet in the BIOS of their products. ABIT doesn’t belong to those unlucky one who didn’t implement this technology: KV8-MAX3 does support Cool’n’Quiet. I should remind you, though, that it only works when you’ve got one or two (not three) memory modules installed in the system. This restriction is caused by the peculiarities of the memory controller integrated into the CPU. Moreover, when KV8-MAX3 worked with enabled Cool’n’Quiet, we sometimes found this mainboard unstable after the clock frequency multiplier was reduced. In rare cases, the mainboard hang up altogether and we couldn’t find the reason for that.

ABIT KV8-MAX3 carries three slots for 184-pin DDR DIMM modules: DDR400, DDR333 or DDR266 SDRAM. The memory controller in the Athlon 64 is a single-channel one and the modern Athlon 64 supports only four memory banks at the most, so you can install three modules only if two of them are single-sided. This limitation also means that you can use no more than 2GB of memory in a Socket754 system. This is a discouraging fact, considering that one of the fortes of the x86-64 technology is flat addressing of more than 4GB of memory in the 64-bit modes. Athlon 64, just like its server mate Opteron, supports ECC.