Introduction and Specification
The Abit AV8 may not be heavy on features, but it is heavy on overclocking and tweaking. If that interests you, chances are you’ll want the AV8 for your upcoming Athlon 64 system.
Introduction
While the new 939-pin socket from AMD is definitely taking longer than expected to catch on, the motherboard designers at Abit have been hard at work getting their products ready for the market. The result is the Abit AV8 motherboard, based on the VIA K8T800 Pro chipset, that supports 1 GHz HyperTransport among other features.
Abit has had a great reputation with the PC enthusiast market for some time, and after visiting their manufacturering facility near Shanghai, China, I was impressed by what they had in place for quality control. Talk with anyone at Abit long enough, and you’ll hear about their use of “100% Japanese capacitors” that will hopefully keep Abit away from the mess of years ago and allow their boards to remain stable and overclocker friendly.
You can look through the entire Abit tour article to see about their Bulletproof technology and their testing methods as well.
Specifications (from Abit USA website):
Processor
– Supports AMD Athlon™ 64 / Athlon™ 64 FX 939-pin processor
– 2000MHz system bus using Hyper Transport™ technology
CPU Integrated Dual Channel Memory Controller
– Four 184-pin DIMM sockets (Un-buffered Non-ECC DIMM)
– Supports Dual Channel DDR 400/333/266 (Max. 4GB)
Chipset
– VIA K8T800 Pro/ VT8237 chipset
– Supports Advanced Configuration and Power Management Interface (ACPI)
– Accelerated Graphics Port connector supports AGP 8X/4X
SATA 150 RAID
– Supports SATA 150 MB/s RAID 0/1
GbE LAN
– On board 10/100/1000M LAN PCI Ethernet Controller
– Operation support ACPI & Wake on LAN
IEEE 1394
– Supports 3 ports IEEE 1394 at 100/200/400 Mb/s transfer rate
Audio
– 6-Channel AC’97 CODEC on board
– Professional digital audio interface supports optical S/P DIF In/Out
Internal I/O Connectors
– 1 AGP 8X/4X slot
– 5 PCI slots
– Floppy Port supports up to 2.88 MB
– 2 x Ultra DMA 33/66/100/133 Connectors
– 2 x SATA 150 Connectors
– 2 x USB headers, 2 x IEEE1394 headers
– 1 x FP-Audio header
– 1 x CD-IN, 1 x AUX IN
Back Panel I/O
– 1 x PS/2 Keyboard, 1 x PS/2 Mouse
– 1 x Serial, 1 x Parallel, 1 x S/P DIF Output, 1 x S/P DIF Input
– 1 x Audio connector (Center/Subwoofer, Surround Speaker)
– 1 x Audio connector (Line Out, Line-in, MIC-in)
– 2 x USB, 1 x IEEE1394 Connector
– 2 x USB, 1 x RJ-45 LAN Connector
Package
– User’s Manual x 1
– Quick Installation Guide x 1
– ABIT uGuru Handbook x 1
– Jumper setting label x 1
– Support CD x 1 / SATA Utility Disk x 1
– USB 2.0 cable x 1 / IEEE1394 cable x 1
– SATA cable x 2 / SATA power cable x 1
– ATA133 Round cable x 1
– FDD Round cable x 1
– I/O shield x 1
Miscellaneous
– ATX form factor (305x245mm)
