ABIT said today it will unveil its new MAX3-series mainboard during Computex Taipei 2003 later this month. The new product is intended for AMD Athlon 64 microprocessors and we told you about ABIT’s intention to introduce such mainboard weeks ago. The company had been considering whether to choose NVIDIA nForce3 or VIA K8T800 for its MAX3 and finally chose the core-logic from VIA for its premier Socket 754 mainboards.

ABIT promises that its KV8-MAX3 will become an ultimate platform for gaming, multimedia and insane overclocking. Being a MAX product, the KV8 is loaded with features including 6-channel Serial ATA-150 RAID, 6-channel audio, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0 and FireWire.

Like the MAX3 solution for Intel Pentium 4 and Prescott processors, the KV8-MAX3 also comes with the ABIT OTES thermal solution for the PWM mosfets and capacitors to ensure stability when overclocked.

Unfortunately, ABIT says nothing about mainboards for Socket 940 AMD Athlon 64 FX processors. This is very strange because the target group for MAX-series of mainboards is extreme computer hardware enthusiasts and they are very likely to choose AMD Athlon 64-FX microprocessors with dual-channel memory controller and very high performance this year. The Socket 754 AMD Athlon 64 chips are positioned for performance-mainstream market where MAX3 mainboards for above $200 are will hardly be massively popular.

Pricing and availability of the KV8-MAX3 were not discussed today, but I would expect the part to emerge towards the second part of October at a quite high price point.