SUMMARY: We collected high-end performance parts from AMD, ABIT, ATI, GeCube, Mushkin, Maxtor, VIA and Thermaltake and built the fastest possible Athlon 64 desktop computer around. The heat is on - become part of the action and read about what this high-powered system is capable of!
At the moment there are two readily available chipsets when it comes to A64. You can go the way of nVidia’s nForce 3 chipset or choose to go with VIA’s K8T800 chipset which really impressed us when we first looked at their reference motherboard a few months back. There must have been a reason ABIT choose to go with the K8T800 chipset from VIA over the nForce 3 from nVidia and we feel that it’s a better chipset as well at this stage in time.
You can read more on VIA’s K8T800 chipset in our full review, here.
- Box and Contents
The KV8-MAX3 box looks excellent and follows the exact same professional look we found on the IC7-MAX3 design. Everything is neatly boxed and has its own space. Within the box we find all the feature comforts that we love from the MAX line from ABIT. First we have cables - Serial ATA, Rounded IDE, absolutely everything to not only get your system up and running but to get it up and running in style.
SecureIDE has made its second appearance for us. SecureIDE is designed to help protect your HDD via encryption. In the event your HDD was stolen the information on it would be safe. For the HDD to work, a special key must be inserted in the back of the header provided. This is definitely an excellent idea and just shows how ABIT go out of their way to give the “enthusiast” everything and then more.
The sticker that ABIT ship with their MAX3 motherboards looks excellent. Any proud owner of such a motherboard will be more then happy to place the sticker on their case.
- OTES Cooling
OTES is ABIT’s cooling technology which helps bring performance cooling at the lowest volumes possible. OTES cooling might just be a bit of marketing department work when it comes to motherboards but it does look excellent and once you turn the motherboard on, you notice many LED’s light up and bring the motherboard to life like no other we’ve ever seen. It’s just one other sign of ABIT taking things to the MAX.
The idea of this cooling on a motherboard is to help prevent the area around the processor from getting too warm and causing system instability. The idea is when you overclock the OTES cooling system keeps the area cooler, hence giving a higher maximum overclock.
