ABIT chose VIA K8T800 chipset for their mainboard. The choice is appropriate, as our previous tests suggest (SiS755 proved excellent in our tests, too, but it is not so widely spread yet – you can hardly find a mainboard on it). VIA K8T800 outperforms NVIDIA nForce3 150 and allows the HyperTransport bus connecting the chipset and the processor to work at its full speed: 800MHz x 16bit each way. The resulting bandwidth is 3.2GB/s each way.

So let’s browse through the specifications of VIA K8T800 and VIA VT8237 South Bridge to see which of their features have been implemented in ABIT KV8-MAX3. First of all, the mainboard offers a typical set of 5 PCI slots and 1 AGP 8x slot.

Thanks to the VT8237 South Bridge, the mainboard features eight USB 2.0 ports. Four of them are placed on the back panel of the mainboard, and there is a bracket with two more ports laid out. This same bracket also carries two IEEE1394 ports. The two remaining USB 2.0 ports available on the board can be connected to the ports on the system case front panel, if you happen to have such a case.

VT8237 South Bridge also supports 6 IDE devices. Four of them may be connected to the two Parallel ATA-133 channels, and two more to the pair of Serial ATA-150 channels. Note that Serial ATA controller from the chipset South Bridge supports RAID 0 and 1 arrays, so you can use this feature and two hard disk drives to increase either reliability or performance of the disk subsystem of your computer.

ABIT KV8-MAX3 comes loaded with integrated controllers, contributing a lot to the overall functionality of the product. First of all, we have to draw your attention to the fact that ABIT paid special attention to Serial ATA interface support, so that this mainboard allows connecting more than two HDDs with this interface. Besides the two channels implemented in the chipset, the mainboard contains four more Serial ATA-150 channels connected to the external Silicon Image Sil3114 PCI controller. Silicon Image Sil3114 allows uniting the HDDs into RAID arrays of levels 0, 1 and 0+1. Overall, you can attach to KV8-MAX3 as many as 6 hard disk drives with the Serial ATA interface.

In its new mainboard ABIT has finally switched to modern AC’97 codecs. KV8-MAX3 features an advanced codec from Realtek, the ALC658 chip, that supports six audio channels, an SPDIF input and output, and complies with the AC’97 specification version 2.3. The compliance means support of Jack Sensing and Universal Audio Jack features: the audio drivers can identify the audio peripheral connected to the mainboard and change the assignment of the audio connectors. The optical SPDIF input and output are seated on the rear panel of the mainboard where you can also find three audio outputs and two inputs (jack-type connectors). Thus, you don’t have to deal with brackets for the back panel of the system case to use the audio capabilities of the mainboard to the full extent: all audio ports are already laid out on the back panel.