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ABIT AV8 3rd Eye

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

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:

• While ABIT EQ and µGURU Utility monitors all kinds of voltages, it doesn't monitor the 12 volt rail. Since many components such as graphics card and processor, use this rail, monitoring it is crucial. So, make sure your power supply's 12 volt rail is adequate to power this board and any other components you use.
• AV8 doesn't use any active cooling on the northbridge and don't use any cooling whatsoever on the southbridge. Not to worry though, the northbridge is hardly warm since air from the processors' heatsink helps it cool down. The southbridge does tend to get warm, but we've never had a problem during testing even with room temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius.
• Some connectors, such as audio connectors and additional USB headers are placed very closely to the PCI slots. Hardly a big deal if you're not using any PCI add-on cards but if you do, you need to pay close attention to these cables so they won't hinder the airflow around your graphics card.
• During testing, we also uncovered an annoying problem: even when we choose the S-ATA drive or array as the first boot up drive, AV8 will default to the IDE hard drive if one is connected. Hopefully, ABIT will fix this in a BIOS update.
• The AV8 allows you to set the voltage used for USB connectors via jumpers. However, these jumpers are located in the back of the board where it's full of capacitors and power connectors. They're still easy to reach, but couldn't they just put in the BIOS like everyone else?
• The placement of the two additional fan headers are a little awkward. So you probably have to directly connect the case fan to the power supply, since the fan's cables may not be long enough to reach the front or upper back of the case.
• The front panel connectors are not color coded. So keep your manual handy to see which front panel headers fit what cable connector when you're putting the motherboard inside the case.

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