I've Abit of an axe

I WOULD love it if this were a cool hardware review, where I give a glowing review and Abit loves me and sends me cool schwag and a free sample of their socket 939 board "for testing purposes" but never asks for it back.

It's not.

Abit has a beautifully featured board for the Athlon 64 called the KV8-MAX3. Default memory timings are “by speed” on this board. No trouble there. DDR-400, PC 3200 is recognized properly, and latency settings get applied to the memory as its timings dictate.

All would be roses except for a small matter. Default FSB clock is set in BIOS to 204MHz. OK, so simply set it to 200, the lowest setting available, and things should be fine. No dice. The 200 setting is actually 203.6. The 204 default is actually 207.4. This board has a default factory overclock of 74MHz on an Athlon 64 3000 or 3200, when most Athlon 64 processors average a 100MHz overclock.

Some processors cannot pull a 74MHz overclock.

On to the memory. DDR-400 is expected to run at 414 Mhz without an automatic adjustment of its latency settings to less aggressive levels. Testing with QuickTech PRO, if the board even boots to the floppy without its cute little post code readout screaming FF, reveals that there is no brand of memory, latency setting adjustments, chip manufactures or pounding of the bench in frustration, that will make anything labeled DDR-400, PC 3200 work with this board.

I have a few of these boards in the shop, and I cannot sell them. I have customers waiting for them. I can't make any of them work properly. Hardware resellers will understand this: I have to use PC 3500 or better memory with this board, which will cost me an extra $40 per unit, which really means nothing, my margin has been blown on the time it has cost me.

I was at CES, and attended the Cyber X games with Charlie. Abit had a booth there and I picked up some sexy Abit posters for my shop and a cool little screwdriver. I was feeling pretty good about being an Abit reseller.

But right now, I want Abit,"my reliable partner", to issue a BIOS update bringing the stock FSB speed of the KV8-MAX3 down to 200MHz true, and I want it yesterday.

I've had a good run with Abit, selling hundreds of boards since the days of the Via KT133A, but right now I just cannot see the KV8-MAX3 carrying our relationship into the future.

Before I get a bunch of hate mail from the enthusiast sector, running a proper FSB stock is not going to hurt this board's performance. µGuru is an extremely nice utility. It allows you to overclock on the fly, and you will still be able to bump the FSB up to your heart's content. I even used it to underclock the board to its lowest setting, 201.5MHz FSB, to achieve some semblance of stability without resorting to running the DDR 400 memory at DDR 333. Getting a good overclocking processor is luck of the draw. What will you do if your processor cannot pull the 74MHz stock overclock?