This is what you can do to speed up your system:

• FSB frequency adjustment. The formal range stretches from 100MHz to 200MHz. Due to peculiarities of the VIA K8T800 chipset, the frequencies of AGP and PCI busses grow along with the FSB frequency. The AGP clock-rate is FSB frequency divided by 3; the PCI frequency = FSB/6.
• You can manually set up the CPU voltage. The processor Vcore can be pulled up above the nominal by 1-350 millivolts. That’s good.
• Vmem can be changed from 2.5V to 3.2V with 0.05V increment. So, ABIT KV8-MAX3 allows raising the memory voltage quite high.
• Vagp can take the following values: 1.5V, 1.55V, 1.6V and 1.65V.
• You can manually adjust the voltage on the HyperTransport bus from 1.2V to 1.4V with 0.05V increment (the nominal Vht = 1.2V).

As you see, the options are not numerous, but quite sufficient for giving a boost to your Athlon 64 processor. You cannot change the CPU frequency multiplier, but it is not important, since the Athlon 64 processor doesn’t allow the multiplier to be above the nominal, only below it. As for your inability to tweak the frequencies of the AGP and PCI bus during FSB overclocking, this is a characteristic trait of the VIA K8T800 chipset and you can’t do anything about that. CPU overclocking is limited, since you are more likely to reach the maximum operational frequency of your AGP and PCI devices rather than the highest operational frequency for your Athlon 64. VIA Technologies is working on a way to eliminate this drawback in the next version of their chipset, VIA K8T800 Pro, which is due in late Q1 of the current year.

By the way, the BIOS Setup of ABIT KV8-MAX3 has certain peculiarities compared to other mainboards. For example, you can check out your settings without leaving the Setup program. That’s not a very revolutionary feature, but it does save a lot of time when you are all involved into overclocking.

The Softmenu Setup page of the BIOS Setup doesn’t contain any settings related to the memory frequency. All settings that refer to the processor-integrated memory controller should be found in the DRAM Configuration page. Here you can set up the memory timings (the ranges are exceptionally wide) and the memory frequency. Note that although you select the memory frequency by choosing DDR400, 333, 266 or 200, the effective memory frequency of the Athlon 64 platform will depend on the FSB clock-rate. That is, when you overclock the FSB, you also increase the memory frequency. The frequencies you see in the BIOS Setup are not precise and rigid numbers. They are actually coefficients that determine the memory frequency depending on the processor clock-rate. So, when the CPU clock-rate goes above the nominal, the memory frequency will go up, too.

This is explained by the fact that the memory controller is integrated into the processor and doesn’t care a bit about what real FSB frequency the CPU works at.

As for other overclocking-related options, I can mention the ability of the mainboard to reset the CPU parameters in case of over-overclocking: some manufacturers forget to implement this option in their products. If you press and hold the Insert key on system startup, you enter the BIOS Setup and correct the wrongly set parameters. In some cases, the mainboard can reset wrong CPU parameters automatically after you turn it off and on.