OTES comes to motherboards
With all those chips out of the way, it's time to sink our teeth into the KV8-MAX3's radical OTES cooling system. Check it out:



The KV8-MAX3's OTES system consists of a massive plastic shroud and variable-speed 45mm exhaust fan. OTES is designed to draw hot air away from the board's MOSFETs, which could improve stability when overclocking. Unlike Chaintech's RadEX cooling system, which connects a heat pipe directly to the MOSFETs, Abit's OTES system relies on airflow alone.

Because it's so large, the OTES shroud may interfere with larger heat sinks and cooler retention mechanisms. The shroud's cutout section gives AMD's reference coolers and retention clip plenty of room, but more obscure designs may not be as cooperative.

With the OTES shroud cutout so close to the CPU socket, I suspect that the cooling system's exhaust fan is also able to draw some heat away from the CPU. However, I'm a little concerned that piping warmer CPU socket air over the board's MOSFETs might interfere with the OTES's MOSFET-cooling mission.

SecureIDE
No modern high-end board would be complete without a little something extra in the bundle, and Abit has outdone itself with the KV8-MAX3's SecureIDE feature.


All you need for SecureIDE

SecureIDE is a nifty little toy that uses 40-bit DES encryption to secure data written to a "parallel" ATA hard drive. All the encryption is done by SecureIDE's eNOVA X-Wall chip, which doesn't sponge any CPU or memory resources from the rest of the system. Users can access the contents of SecureIDE hard drives by using one of two included IEEE 1394 keys, though a machine must be booted with the key connected in order for the hard drive to be recognized.

Perhaps the sweetest thing about SecureIDE is that it's completely OS-independent. The system requires no drivers and should work with whatever flavor of Windows, Linux, or BSD users want to run.

Although SecureIDE can't do anything to protect an online system's hard drive from malicious hackers or other uninvited system intruders (at least when the IEEE key is plugged in), SecureIDE does provide a measure of security if a PC is ever stolen. Without SecureIDE, a stolen PC's hard drive could easily give up credit card numbers and other valuable personal information—not to mention incriminating photos. Thankfully, breaking 40-bit DES encryption requires quite a bit of work.