Socket 939 Motherboards - MSI and nVidia vs. ABIT and VIA

ABIT AV8 3rd Eye

On the other side of the fence is the ABIT AV8 - 3rd Eye. It too is a standard ATX sized motherboard and uses the VIA K8T800 Pro chipset along side the VIA VT8237 Southbridge. Since the development of the original nForce chipset, there has always been a good deal of competition between the VIA and nVidia companies. This is a good thing, of course, since it keeps prices at a more stable level. If only we could get some decent competition for Microsoft, it wouldn't be so darned expensive for the operating system!

Anyway, lets take a gander at the main feature set of the ABIT board.

CPU Support

Supports AMD Athlon™64 / Athlon™64 FX 939-pin processor

2000MHz system bus using Hyper Transport™ technology

VIA K8T800 Pro/VT6237 Chipset

VIA K8T800 Pro/ VT8237 chipset

Supports Advanced Configuration and Power Management Interface (ACPI)

Accelerated Graphics Port connector supports AGP 8X/4X

Memory

Four 184-pin DIMM sockets (Unbuffered Non-ECC DIMM)

Supports 2 DIMM Single Channel DDR 400/333/266 (Max. 2GB)

Supports 4 DIMM Dual Channel DDR 400/333/266 (Max. 4GB)

IDE/SATA

2 x Ultra DMA 133/100/66/33 Connectors

Supports SATA 150 MB/s RAID 0/1

Other Features

6-Channel AC'97 CODEC on board

On board GigABIT PCI Ethernet Controller

Supports 3 ports IEEE 1394 at 100/200/400 Mb/s transfer rate

8x USB 2.0

uGuru Technology

ABIT Guru Clock (The 3rd Eye On Your PC)

Instant Overclocking & H/W Monitoring & PC On/Off

MSN/E-mail Notification

Large LCD Screen & Room Temperature Display