Chipping away
Under the hood, Abit's KV8-MAX3 is anchored by VIA's K8T800 chipset and a smattering of peripheral chips from a number of different manufacturers. Since the K8T800 is really the heart of this beast, it's the best place to start.

Unlike NVIDIA's nForce3 150, which is a single-chip solution for the Athlon 64, VIA's K8T800 chipset is made up of more traditional north and south bridge chips. Since AMD integrates the Athlon 64's memory controller directly onto the processor, the K8T800 north bridge really only handles the chipset's AGP interface and HyperTransport processor link. The K8T800's processor link runs at 800MHz and is 16 bits wide in both directions, so it offers more bandwidth than the nForce3's 600MHz 8-bit/16-bit HT link.

Though the K8T800 uses a HyperTransport link to talk to the Athlon 64, the chipset uses VIA's V-Link interface to connect the chipset's north and south bridge components. The latest flavor of V-Link offers 1.06GB/sec of bandwidth, which should give the south bridge's integrated peripherals plenty of pipe to play with.

Speaking of peripherals, the VT8237 south bridge includes six-channel audio and a set USB ports. Though the south bridge supports up to eight USB ports, the KV8-MAX3 curiously delivers only six; there isn't even a header on the board that provides access to the missing two ports. The VT8237 works with Realtek's ALC658 codec chip to provide six output channels of audio goodness. The ALC658 is Realtek's replacement for the wildly popular ALC650, and like the ALC650, the ALC658's 3D audio capabilities are handled in software by a set of Sensaura-laden drivers.

Moving to storage, the VT8237 offers a standard ATA/133 interface in addition to two Serial ATA ports. Drives connected to the VT8237's Serial ATA ports can be combined in RAID 0 and 1 arrays using VIA's V-RAID software, and since the Serial ATA interface is bound directly to the south bridge, it doesn't have to share limited PCI bandwidth with other system components or the board's alternate Serial ATA option. To give the KV8-MAX3 a little extra Serial ATA love, Abit specs the board with Silicon Image's Sil3114 Serial ATA RAID controller. Unlike VIA's south bridge SATA, the Silicon Image chip rides the PCI bus and must share bandwidth with the board's integrated peripheral chips and whatever users plug into one of five PCI slots. With the ability to scale RAID 0, 1, and 0+1 arrays across up to four drives, the Sil3114 could run into bandwidth sharing issues with other PCI devices.

3COM's Marvell 940-MV00 Gigabit Ethernet chip joins the Sil3114 on the KV8-MAX3's PCI bus, as does Texas Instruments' TSB43AB23 IEEE 1394 controller. The TI chip serves up a total of three Firewire ports, and the KV8-MAX3 provides access to all of them.

Beyond the chips, I should mention a couple of other things here. In an attempt to avoid cap-busting, Abit uses high-end Rubycon capacitors throughout the KV8-MAX3. Rubycon's capacitors were largely immune to the bursting problems that plagued the many motherboards a few years ago, and Abit is determined not to fall victim to defective caps again.

The benefit of more reliable high-end capacitors may not be easy to see, but everyone should be able to appreciate the KV8-MAX3's integrated POST code display. Instead of listening to annoying beep codes, users can easily troubleshoot POST problems using the display. The POST code display may not be a big deal if your system is running smoothly, but it's a helpful touch when things go wrong.