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ABIT AV8 3rd Eye

AMD Athlon 64 socket 939 motherboard
Chipset VIA K8T800 Pro and VIA 8237
AGP / PCI

Overall Score: 95 points



Evaluating motherboards is not always easy. But once in a while, you come across a motherboard that's so well put together and everything runs flawlessly the way it supposed to. The AV8 3rd Eye from ABIT is a good example of this. ABIT have made quite a name for themselves, and their boards are no strangers to gamers, power users and overclockers. The have a long experience in making motherboards and that experience have been put to good use to make the AV8 3rd Eye.

Overview

The full specification (taken from ABIT's website)
CPU
CPU Integrated Dual Channel Memory Controller
Chipset
SATA 150 RAID
GbE LAN
IEEE 1394
Audio
ABIT Engineered
ABIT Guru Clock inside (The 3rd Eye On Your PC)
Internal I/O Connectors
Back Panel I/O
Miscellaneous
There are several interesting and not-so-interesting about this board. First things first, the good news:

µGURU Clock



ABIT have bundled an external hardware monitoring unit, dubbed 'µGURU clock' with the AV8. The µGURU clock displays important information about your hardware: heat, rails and core voltages, fan speeds, processor's speed and even lets you know if you have any MSN messages. Anyone that have experience hardware failures will appreciate this bundle. You can see all these information even at boot up, you don't even have to go inside the BIOS to see if your fans are working or not. The installation is also pretty simple: Just plug the µGURU clock cable to the unit. The cable goes to the back of your PC, through an expansion slot. From there, hook up the internal cable to the µGURU cable header in the motherboard. For the MSN alert to work, you need to install the included µGURU Utility for Windows, but everything else should work even without the software.

Diagnostic Tools

Two other useful features are the diagnostic code LED and the power LED. Should your AV8 experience problems, just look at code on the diagnostic LED and look it up in the manual. So, no more trial-and-error troubleshooting with just BIOS beep error codes. Before you unplug any components, be sure to check the power LED that lights up if the motherboard is still receiving electricity from the power supply. For the sake of your components' health, never remove any components when that LED is still on. If you have to clear the CMOS, the jumper is very visible with its yellow color coding and easy to reach.

Expansions and Add-Ons

As peripherals go, AV8 can fulfill most of your needs. By default, there's 6 USB, 3 Firewire ports and a Gigabit LAN connector. You will also find optical SPDIF connectors for both input and output. For legacy purposes, there's still PS/2 connectors for your mouse and keyboard, 1 COM / serial port and 1 LPT / printer port. Since it's using the VIA 8237 southbridge, AV8 also provides 2 Ultra ATA-133 channel for your IDE hard drives, and 2 Serial ATA 150 connectors. The S-ATA controllers supports RAID 0/1 by default. Since it only using the built-in S-ATA controller inside the southbridge, you won't be able to use S-ATA 250 controller features such as hot-swapping and native command queuing. Choosing S-ATA drives or array as the first boot up drive is also very easy. The BIOS will automatically detect any S-ATA drives you've connected, you only have to choose 'Bootable Add In Cards' as the default first boot drive and make sure that the Bootable Add In Cards point at your S-ATA drive or array using the 'Onchip SATA RAID'. No IDE RAID is available since the VIA 8237 doesn't support this feature and there are no additional IDE / S-ATA controllers on this board. ABIT is kind enough to place the IDE connectors in a horizontal position, so you can keep those IDE cables from hindering airflow.

Like most socket 939 AGP equipped boards, the AV8 comes with 1 AGP slot and 5 PCI slots. All socket 939 boards, whether PCI Express or AGP / PCI, comes with 4 DIMM slots for DDR memory modules and the AV8 is no exception. If you're using old, PCI dinosaurs add-on cards that have some compatibility problems with Plug n Play, you can set a slot to exclusively use a certain IRQ and of course set the PCI Timer as low or as high as you like. Like we said, the AV8 will fulfill most of your needs, expansion wise.

Tweaking and Overclocking Friendly

For those who want manual adjustment settings, many overclocking and tweaking options are available. If you remember the good ol' days, ABIT usually puts all these options under the 'Soft Menu' item in BIOS. Now, they're using the name 'µGURU Utility' but for all intent and purposes they're the same since you'll find what you need in here. Processor, AGP, chipset, memory voltage settings can be automatically set or manually adjusted. You can also set the multiplier for your processor, adjust the FSB and set the AGP and PCI speed by using a divider or at a fixed 66 MHz or 74 MHz. The obligatory memory timing adjustments are also available and quite a lot too. Still inside µGURU Utility, you can view monitoring statistics through ABIT EQ, such as voltages, fan speeds and temperatures. There's also a feature called Beep Control: When it's activated the motherboard will emit a series of beeps should any of the monitored statistics goes above a set limit. Quite a nice, additional protection from ABIT.

There are some minor gripes with this board. But they are minor and if you can live with them, you have a really good board on your hands. The bad news:

Performance

Now, on to the performance evaluation. Like we said before, the AV8 is a good board. Even with its minor gripes, features such as the µGURU Clock or the multitudes of ports and connectors more than make up for it. During testing, we encounter no problems what so ever with this board. The installation process is smooth, even installing directly to S-ATA drives and arrays are easy since ABIT bundled the necessary driver disk. Everything just works the way that it should.

One note on performance: the AV8 defaults to a FSB of 204 MHz by default. Choosing 200 MHz doesn't make much difference (less than 2 FPS or lower), so we're using the default FSB set by the board (204 MHz). This does makes the processor runs a fraction faster (our socket 939 Athlon 64 3000+ runs at 1838 MHz with the AV8 3rd Eye).

Before looking at the test results, we encourage you to read our 'How We Evaluate' article so you understand how we conduct our test and benchmarks. More importantly, you will also see how each benchmarks react with our test setup. We only put the average, minimum and maximum fps in this evaluation to keep it brief.

Our test setup
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 'Newcastle' socket 939
2 x 256 MB Kingston KVR 3-3-3 PC3200 DDR-SDRAM
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro AGP 8x
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GBs Serial ATA 8 MB buffer
ASUS E-616 DVD-ROM
450 watts ATX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
ATI Catalyst 5.4 reference driver
VIA Hyperion 4-in-1 4.56 reference driver
Realtek ALC 658 Driver WDM 5.630 (motherboard supplied driver)
DirectX 9.0c
all respected games used for benchmarks have been updated to their latest, final builds.

Why we've chosen this setup:

AGP motherboards and graphics cards are on the way out, replaced by their respective PCI Express variants. Even gamers and users using existing AGP boards will eventually upgrade to PCI Express motherboards. For the most part, the main reason they haven't is because of the graphics card. There are faster AGP graphics card than the Radeon 9700 Pro such as the GeForce 6800 and Radeon X800 series, or even the mainstream parts such as GeForce 6600 and Radeon X700 series. But ask yourselves this question: Why buy the AGP variants now, since we're all eventually going to upgrade to PCI Express? Gamers still using AGP cards will either buy mainstream cards (6600 and X700 series) or older high end cards (5900 and 9700/9800 series). Why the Radeon 9700 Pro? Well, this old card is still pretty powerful and it can be bought for around US $ 125, compared to the average US $ 200 for GeForce 6600 GTs. Remember, that we're targeting mainstream users here and they don't want to spend more money than they have to on a setup that's going to be obsolete within a year. That's why we've chosen this setup, since we feel it reflects the market for this product more accurately. Of course, we will be using a different setup for testing high end cards and PCI Express motherboards.

The results:

Dungeon Siege
AV8 3rd Eye
K8NSC
6
93.43
496.47
.
6
110.28
506.8
Minimum fps Average fps Maximum fps

Don't let the minimum fps fool you: that minimum 6 fps happens on mid-level loads. Gameplay wise, we rarely go down beyond 30 fps and that happens mostly in the last parts of the benchmarks. So overall, we get very solid average fps of 93.43 fps and minimum 30 fps in Dungeon Siege. Clearly the AV8 gives fluid gameplay experience you can expect from the Athlon 64 3000+.

Splinter Cell - Tbilisi 1
AV8 3rd Eye
K8NSC
24.60
49.25
108.50
.
24.52
49.08
104.87
Minimum fps Average fps Maximum fps

With Splinter Cell, we do get a lower minimum 24.6 fps and an average fps of 49.25 fps, similar to what we expect from this kind of setup. Still playable and doesn't interfere with gameplay. The AV8 has a slight advantage in the lightest part of the demo, but that difference is hardly noticeable in gameplay.

Call of Duty - Dawnville
AV8 3rd Eye
K8NSC
18
120.1
269
.
18
117.1
265
Minimum fps Average fps Maximum fps

Removing the 80 fps cap in Call of Duty nets us an average fps of 120 fps, more or less. Again, the minimum 18 fps happens at the very beginning of the benchmark. In gameplay, we get minimum frame rates of 45 fps, Call of Duty is very fluid on this system. So, even if you don't execute the command 'com_maxfps 0' in the console, you still get a very solid 80 fps in average on the AV8 3rd Eye.

Lock-On: Modern Air Combat
AV8 3rd Eye
K8NSC
16
52.47
154
.
15
53.85
156
Minimum fps Average fps Maximum fps

The second heaviest system benchmarks we use, Lock On, gave results of minimum 16 fps and an average 52.47 fps. Just like before in Splinter Cell, we only see a slight variation between platforms, even with different chipsets. The AV8 proves its no slouch even when its using the VIA chipset instead of the NForce3 250 Gb chipset.

F1 Career Challenge
AV8 3rd Eye
K8NSC
56
82.80
101
.
55
81.34
100
Minimum fps Average fps Maximum fps

F1 Challenge proves that it can still ran faster, but you do need a faster processor AND graphics card. Even on this bandwidth sensitive benchmark, there's not much difference between the two. A minimum 56 fps and an average 82.80 fps is very acceptable, proving this system offers fluid gameplay with this game.

Nascar Season 2003
AV8 3rd Eye
K8NSC
43
61.87
108
.
41
58.77
101
Minimum fps Average fps Maximum fps

Nascar 2003 Season is more system limited than F1 Challenge, but is still very playable at a minimum of 44 fps and an average of 61.87 fps. Here the results varies slightly more for both minimum and average frame rates, but not that significant (3 fps from around a 60 fps average). That's because the difference is on the higher fps, you could see there's a 7 fps difference between the two system's maximum fps.

Full Spectrum Warrior
AV8 3rd Eye
K8NSC
37
50.37
74
.
37
50.35
74
Minimum fps Average fps Maximum fps

Full Spectrum Warrior, who by the way will have an expansion pack or a sequel soon, gives us a minimum 37 fps and an average 50.37, definitely playable. Looks like the general trend persist: we won't get any significant fps differences between chipsets and motherboards with the Athlon 64 system.

Rome Total War
AV8 3rd Eye
K8NSC
15
22.49
29
.
16
21.14
29
Minimum fps Average fps Maximum fps

Finally, the heaviest system benchmark, Rome Total War, gives us around 15 to 17 minimum fps and an average 22.32 fps. Same thing here, although the fps is lower for all systems. 1 or 2 fps at most, but that's expected with this benchmark.

Conclusion:

If you want an AGP Athlon 64 platform and still want to use AGP graphics cards, ABIT AV8 3rd Eye doesn't just fits the bill, it actually gives you more. You get the performance and the stability that have made ABIT famous, plus features to make your PC healthy for years to come. Looks like you're going to get the same performance, regardless of the chipset. If you compare it with a PCI Express motherboard, the performance isn't that much different. Sure, it has some drawbacks but they are minor and most users and gamers won't even notice them. You can use the best and latest technologies such as Serial ATA and socket 939 Athlon 64 processors, and when the time comes, upgrade to PCI Express motherboards.

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