Specifications

abit KV8-MAX3
Written by Chris Emry
Friday, 04 September 2009 10:39
To the immediate right of the USB 2.0 headers is the VIA VT8237 Southbridge. The two SATA
ports that the Southbridge natively supports rest to the right of the VT8237, with a yellow
colored Clear_CMOS jumper just beneath them. Although the Clear_CMOS jumper cap has an
extended tip, the location of the Clear_CMOS jumper could be hard to grab hold of if you have
the SATA cables attached to these two connectors.
Above the front panel header is the floppy connector. It would have been much better if ABIT
decided to place the floppy connector lying parallel to the right edge of the board so that you
could route a floppy cable easier within the case. The floppy connector could also block the
visualization of codes from the diagnostic LED that has been placed right above it, but we are
glad to see that the diagnostic LED is onboard and wish every motherboard could be equipped
with this helpful luxury. To the left of the diagnostic LED is ABIT’s exclusive µGuru chip, while
the System BIOS chip is located on the other side of the LED display between the floppy
connector and the Winbond hardware monitoring chip.
As we make our way into the memory portion of the PCB, we next see two IDE connectors are
located farther up the right edge of the KV8-MAX3. The location of these IDE connectors is in
an ideal position, allowing improved air circulation inside the case when bulky IDE cables are
attached. The system buzzer and an additional fan header are in this area as well, located
under the IDE connectors beside a motherboard mounting hole. The CPU fan header cannot be
seen in the image above, but it rests in-between the first DIMM slot and where the edge of the
OTES mechanism begins to pull air through this enhanced cooling solution.
Now, another problem with the design is evident within the memory area. No matter how many
times we stress to motherboard manufacturers concerning problematic areas with their designs,
an installed video card in the AGP slot will repeatedly interfere with removing or installing extra
memory in the memory slots if each of these slots are placed too close to one another. This
design flaw can be found on many motherboards, much more than we would like to admit, and
unfortunately this problem is present on the KV8-MAX3. This makes it overly difficult to perform
a memory upgrade which should be the easiest type of upgrade for any computer system. In
many cases, this problem is merely due to lack of available real-estate on the motherboard, and
from the optimal trace routing that the simulators gave to the engineers, although we still don’t
care for this common problem, to say the least.
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