Features
Because the ABIT KV8 Pro is a budget-minded board, there are some features missing that some of you should be aware of. First there are no Firewire connections on the motherboard. This means if you will have to use a dedicated PCI Firewire card for your needs. Also, there are only two DIMMs for a total of 2GB capacity of memory which may restrict some of your upgrade flexibility. While the KV8 Pro is not loaded to the nines like some other packages, there are many of you who prefer this because you save money on features you don’t use.
The KV8 Pro has only two DIMMs.
Aside from this, the ABIT AV8 is well appointed for a board under the $100 range. There are two SATA and two IDE headers controlled by the VIA 8237 Southbridge which means a total of 6 drives supported. Though this is short of the 10-12 drive support featured on some other boards today, most of you will be just fine with ‘only’ 6 drives. There is also RAID 0 and RAID 1 functionality, but no RAID 5, 1+0, or 10.
Two SATA and two IDE connections for 6 drives max.
There is 6-channel sound on a Realtek ALC658 chip, SPDIF digital input and output, and Gigabit LAN.
The big feature of the ABIT KV8 Pro, however, is the µGuru microprocessor. Through either the BIOS or the bundled µGuru software, you can monitor a whole array of voltages and temperatures, control your fans, and overclock without rebooting. I know some of you my dismiss such features as a company’s shameless attempt at cashing in on the enthusiast market, but ABIT’s implementation is really worth looking at. Later when we look at their software and overclocking, it will be very evident that ABIT is putting their money where their mouth is when it comes to enthusiast features.
Too bad now that ABIT gone
Too bad now that ABIT gone out of business there no way of updating the motherboard. damn