ABIT KV8-MAX3 Socket754 Mainboard Review

by Ilya Gavrichenkov
01/22/2004 | 11:17 PM

AMD took a more aggressive stance in promoting its Athlon 64 processor this year. They rolled out the Athlon 64 3400+, dropped the price for the 3200+ model to $278, and introduced the cheaper Athlon 64 3000+ that costs just above $200.

This marketing policy will surely push up the sales of Socket754 processors, as they are now quite a good choice for building a mainstream or high-end computer system. So, the question which mainboard to choose for such a processor, becomes an urgent one. We shouldn’t be afraid of the allegedly short lifecycle of the Socket754 itself. AMD is planning to introduce faster models like the Athlon 64 3700+ for this socket and even then the Socket754 won’t die but move gradually into the low-end price range.

Not so long ago we tested 13 mainboards for Socket754 processors (see our Socket754 Platform: 13 Mainboards Roundup), but of course this is not the only choice you have. Many interesting products have appeared since then and one of them comes from the renowned ABIT. The Socket754 mainboard from ABIT has an aura of uniqueness about itself as it belongs to the well-known MAX3 family and features the new technology called ìGuru. We thought we shouldn’t neglect this mainboard just because it had been late for our most comprehensive roundup. So, this article is dedicated exclusively to it.

Specifications

ABIT KV8-MAX3 is the only offer from the company for the Athlon 64 platform; ABIT has no Socket940 mainboard in its product list either. Anyway, KV8-MAX3 is sharply positioned as a toy for enthusiastic users. Well, Athlon 64 processors appeared just a few months ago, so other user groups haven’t had time to get accustomed to them. ABIT obviously wants to appeal to the enthusiastic user with the widest functionality and certain weirdness of their mainboard and don’t be surprised to see this thing selling at $160 and higher.

The accessories coming with the ABIT KV8-MAX3 are gorgeous. They include:

• CD and diskette with standard drivers and utilities;
• Round aerodynamic ATA-100/133 cable and a similar FDD cable;
• Four SerialATA cables;
• Two power cables for SerialATA HDDs;
• Bracket for the back panel of the system case with two USB 2.0 and two IEEE1394 ports;
• I/O shield;
• Secure IDE system that consists of a daughter card, a cable for connecting the key and two keys;
• User’s manual.

Regrettably, there is no second USB bracket with two additional USB 2.0 ports, so you cannot use two of the eight available USB ports, as they are not connected to anything. It means that you should buy a bracket like that yourself, or use the USB ports on your system case (if it has any ports). Certainly, ABIT implies that these cases will be used with their news board, because this way all 8 USB 2.0 ports will be active.

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.

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.

ABIT KV8-MAX3 supports three IEEE1394 ports due to the TSB43AB23 controller from Texas Instruments. One of them is situated on the mainboard back panel, and two more (4-pin and 6-pin ones) are found on the bracket for the back panel of the system case (the one that has USB 2.0 ports, too). In our ABIT IC7-MAX3 Review I complained that that mainboard had no diagnostic tools. ABIT made amendments in its KV8-MAX3: the mainboard comes with a diagnostic controller that displays POST codes on the two-position digital indicator located on the left lower corner of the PCB. This tool will help localize and (hopefully) eliminate any hardware problems occurring on the startup.

Winding up this section of the review, I would like to dwell upon the Secure IDE controller you receive with the mainboard. We discussed it in detail in our ABIT IC7-MAX3 Review, so I will just briefly remind you that Secure IDE is a daughter card to be attached between the HDD and the mainboard. The Secure IDE controller encrypts data that pass through it in real time; it is compatible with the Parallel ATA interface. The eNOVA X-Wall LX-40 chip used in the Secure IDE system performs encryption using the open DES algorithm with a 40-bit key.

You connect the controller card to the HDD and the mainboard, then connect the power cable and use your hardware key. The hardware key (you get 2 identical keys) is connected via a special cord that goes outside of the system case. If the key is in the lock on startup, Secure IDE starts decrypting the data on the HDD until the next system reboot. If there is no key on startup, the HDD will be inaccessible.

The Secure IDE system is more reliable than software solutions, since the entire disk is encrypted in this case, including the boot sector and housekeeping information. Besides that, Secure IDE doesn’t require any software or drivers – all encryption tasks are solved on the hardware level, with a slight performance tradeoff. The central processor doesn’t have to bear another load, while Secure IDE is fully compatible with any operation system.

Closer Look: PCB Design

When designing the KV8-MAX3 mainboard, ABIT engineers seem to have given enough thought to the exterior of the product. Its looks is quite original, I should say.

First of all, let’s take a closer look at the CPU power supply circuit. It is a 3-channel circuit, with nothing special as far as functionality goes. On the other hand, Socket754 processors don’t require “special” power supply circuits. According to the specs, even the upcoming Athlon 64 3700+ will demand a current of 60A and a voltage of 1.55V, no more than that. Only processors with a performance rating of 4000+ and more will call for a more powerful CPU power supply circuit (with a current of up to 80A), but such processors will be installed into Socket939 rather than Socket754.

ABIT wouldn’t be ABIT if they didn’t add come “exclusive features”. This time we see the Outside Thermal Exhaust System (OTES), which is similar to the contraption installed on graphics cards of the Siluro series. KV8-MAX3 uses this system to cool the CPU voltage regulator and the socket area. OTES consists of a pipe with the open end near the processor and a small exhaust fan on the back panel of the mainboard.

Of course, OTES looks cool and effective. Moreover, it is highlighted with three red diodes when working that is why if you have a case with a transparent window in it, you should be really happy with the way your system built on ABIT KV8-MAX3 will look. As for the functional efficiency of the OTES cooling system, the situation is not so clear here.

Airflow around the MOSFET transistors that build the voltage regulator circuitry has little effect: it would be better to install heatsinks on them. However, there is nothing of the kind on ABIT KV8-MAX3. But after all, the temperature of the transistors is pretty moderate. It is about 50°C with the OTES working and the processor under a full workload, and it equals 52°C without the OTES. These 2°C are of little help really and we can conclude that OTES doesn’t contribute much to cooling the CPU voltage regulator. ABIT proponents may say that OTES helps to take warm air away from the hottest area of the mainboard where the processor, chipset and memory are located, but this is actually the job for the power supply unit. According to the ATX specification, the PSU should suck in the air from this very hot zone and blow it away from the system case. System fans are also usually installed in this area. So, in my humble opinion, the functional advantages of the OTES are quite ephemeral.

Let’s now enumerate the disadvantages of the OTES, especially since there are quite a few of them. First, the fan adds to the overall noise from the system case. The fan is not loud, but I can’t call it noiseless either. Second, the pipe of the OTES system makes it impossible to install coolers that expand to the top, like the ones from Zalman. The last and most frustrating disadvantage of the OTES is that the back panel of the mainboard carries fewer ports, since the OTES fan sits there. All legacy ports have been removed: parallel and serial ones. Of course, there are no new peripherals for these ports, but older equipment still works somewhere. That’s why it is a disappointing thing that ABIT KV8-MAX3 has no COM and LPT ports at all: there are even no onboard connectors for them on the PCB.

The placement of the components on the PCB is quite original, too. For example, the North Bridge of the chipset sits behind the processor socket rather than next to it. This solution is good, though, as it helped to move apart the PCI slots from the AGP and your AGP graphics card with its massive cooling system won’t block the next PCI slot. On the other hand, the graphics card will block the left latches of the DIMM slots: the AGP is too close to the DIMM slots.

The chipset North Bridge features active cooling, although many mainboards on VIA K8T800 come without that. Moreover, the fan on our mainboard was annoying enough, producing an unpleasant screechy sound. Overall, ABIT KV8-MAX3 mainboard comes with two fans. If it were not for the special noise-reduction technologies, KV8-MAX3 would be the loudest mainboard for the Athlon 64 processor.

Various connectors are scattered in no particular order on the PCB. Sometimes, it’s not quite easy to use them. For example, the ATX power supply connectors (standard and additional 12V one) are behind the processor socket and the power cables would go over the CPU cooler, preventing proper cooling. The FDD connector is moved to the left edge of the PCB, so the FDD cable goes through the entire system case. The SerialATA connectors that refer to the South Bridge of the chipset and the onboard USB connectors have been placed in front of the PCI slots, so that you will get a mess of cables there. All in all, the PCB design of ABIT KV8-MAX3 is original, but not very easy-to-use.

BIOS and Overclocking

ABIT always positions its mainboards as excellent platforms for CPU overclocking. The new KV8-MAX3 is no exception. Moreover, ìGuru technology from ABIT implemented into this product makes it the more appropriate for overclocking experiments.

Let’s now see what overclocking options we have in the BIOS Setup of the ABIT KV8-MAX3. The company uses BIOSes from Award and modifies them greatly. When you enter the Setup program, you notice the Softmenu Setup section where all CPU-related (i.e. overclocking-related) options are listed.

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.

The new versions of the BIOS Setup of ABIT KV8-MAX3 allow saving settings profiles either in CMOS or in flash memory. Thus, you can easily restore all BIOS settings after clearing up the CMOS data. The mainboard can store as many as five profiles; it is something like the CMOS Reloaded technology from DFI.

The BIOS Setup has some tricky places, too. For example, when you select default processor settings, the mainboard deliberately sets the FSB frequency to 204MHz (2% above the nominal). Of course, ABIT KV8-MAX3 will perform faster in benchmarks, but this is indisputable overclocking.

Let’s find out how well will ABIT KV8-MAX3 run after overclocking. As I have mentioned earlier, VIA K8T800 chipset behaves badly at overclocking, since it cannot lock the frequencies of the AGP and PCI busses at the nominal values. On the other hand, all currently available models of the Athlon 64 processors do not allow increasing the frequency that much with simple air cooling. In fact, 20% frequency gain is the maximum you can get today (until the new revision of the core – CG). Under such conditions, the growth of the AGP and PCI frequencies along with the FSB clock-rate may not be a crucial factor. So let’s turn to practical tests.

The frequency of Athlon 64 processor is calculated by multiplying the CPU multiplier by the processor bus frequency. You should be aware, though, that the frequency of the processor bus is a formal thing in Athlon 64 systems: it is merely the frequency of the signal for clocking the CPU and other system components. Athlon 64 connects to the chipset via the special two-way HyperTransport bus with a width of 16bits and 800MHz frequency (processor bus frequency times 4, to be exact). As for the memory frequency, it depends on the processor frequency, since the memory controller is integrated into the CPU. VIA K8T800 chipset clocks the AGP bus at 1/3 of the CPU bus frequency. It means that when you increase the processor bus frequency in the BIOS Setup, you automatically raise the frequencies of the CPU, memory, HyperTransport, AGP/PCI. It would be much better for overclocking, if we could speed up Athlon 64 by changing its multiplier. In this case, we would avoid potential pitfalls like reaching the frequency peak of the chipset or AGP/PCI devices rather than of the processor. However, this processor doesn’t allow increasing its multiplier above the nominal value. As for our particular mainboard, it doesn’t even know how to decrease the multiplier. So, we only have the option of overclocking the FSB here.

We took an Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz) for our overclocking tests. The cooling system was pretty common: we used a cooler from the processor retail box. For better results, we also increased the CPU voltage by 10%, up to 1.65V. We also took special overclocker memory modules from OCZ, the PC4000 Gold Edition, that are guaranteed to work at frequencies up to 500MHz. By using such memory, we could keep the same memory frequency divisor (it was 1/10 of the CPU frequency throughout our tests or “DDR400” as the BIOS Setup calls it).

We had some problems at 222MHz FSB: namely the RAID array we used wouldn’t work any longer. It turned out the SerialATA RAID controller from VT8237 South Bridge (as well as the external Silicon Image Sil3114) is very sensitive to the PCI frequency. When the FSB clock-rate was equal to 222MHz, the PCI frequency reached only 37MHz, but that was enough for the SerialATA controller to lose its stability. We continued our overclocking using one Parallel ATA drive -Western Digital Caviar WD400JB. Fortunately, the Parallel ATA controller in the South Bridge is more stable during overclocking than its SerialATA counterpart.

With a single Parallel ATA drive, we reached higher results. The processor remained stable until the FSB frequency reached 232MHz. This is the maximum for our processor. Neither the reduced HyperTransport frequency nor higher memory divisors helped to improve the result any more. However, our experience with the Athlon 64 3200+ suggests that this CPU rarely conquers higher frequencies.

Thus, ABIT KV8-MAX3 can be used for overclocking the processor, but you should use Parallel ATA hard disk drives rather than SerialATA ones in this case. This limitation is caused by VIA K8T800 chipset, and there is no reason to blame the ABIT’s engineering team. This chipset doesn’t allow locking the AGP/PCI frequencies, and you will be better off choosing a mainboard on the NVIDIA nForce3 150 for overclocking (in spite of their lower performance) or on the SiS755 (if you are lucky to find one).

ABIT uGuru

The newly-announced uGuru technology is one of the distinctive features of ABIT KV8-MAX3 mainboard. Let’s find out what this technology actually does. According to marketing papers from ABIT, the special-purpose ABIT uGuru microprocessor makes the “heart” of this technology. But if you dare to rip off the uGuru sticker from this “special-purpose” processor, you will see a chip from Winbond, which is an embedded W83L950D microcontroller based on the Turbo 8025 architecture with 40KB of flash memory, 256 bytes of internal RAM and 2KB of external SRAM. ABIT uses this controller to control the fans, to store the BIOS profiles and to save the overclocked frequencies from Windows.

If we stick to the ABIT’s own terminology, ABIT uGuru technology consists of several parts:

• FanEQ is the most interesting component that serves to control the rotation speeds of the fans. It controls the CPU fan as well as the fans on the North Bridge and in the OTES system. The key point of the technology is simple: you can set it up to reduce the rotational speeds when the temperatures of the system components are low enough. You can enter the bottom and top threshold values when the cooler works at its slowest or highest speed. Between these two critical temperatures, the rotational speed of the fan changes linearly. You can configure FanEQ either in the BIOS (where you can also set up the maximum and minimum voltages sent to the cooler) or in a special Windows-based utility.
  

  

  

  Thanks to the FanEQ technology, you can reduce the noise from ABIT KV8-MAX3 greatly. This technology is really very useful, considering that this mainboard has two additional high-speed fans.

Besides that, ABIT provided its uGuru with several other utilities: for updating the BIOS from Windows, for sending messages to the technical service, for setting up the audio codec. These utilities are not interesting by themselves, so I won’t dwell on them for long. Let’s get to performance tests now.

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:

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.