Abit KV8 Pro

The Abit KV8 Pro is like a Lotus Elise, stripped down and designed for speed. The KV8 Pro boasts the new VIA K8T800 Pro chipset, the Abit µGuru monitoring and diagnostics system, a lot of BIOS settings, and not much else. Abit have chosen to forego extra bits such as additional RAID controllers, firewire ports, or even a third DIMM slot in order to remove anything that might hold back a decent overclock.

The board has a slightly unconventional layout, in that the north bridge is located between the CPU socket and the IO panel. This is a good move, because it brings it closer to the power MOSFETs and into the airflow of both the CPU fan and any case exhaust fans. Surprisingly, the north bridge is passively cooled., but the sink is fairly tall, with lot of fins. There is also a fan header right next to it, so the user can easily fit a fan if they need to. This gives the best of both worlds, with silence as standard and high performance cooling only a dab of glue away. A nice touch was the right angle mounted IDE connectors, allowing a very neat cabling job. The only layout issue I found was that the graphics card obstructs the clear CMOS jumper, which could be extremely tiresome.

Unlike many, the Abit manual includes detailed descriptions of the BIOS settings and functions. The manual is a well written 80-page booklet, all in English. It contains a number of little tips and hints that would be very useful to the novice performance seeker. The BIOS options include separate Voltage settings for the HT bus, the north bridge, south bridge, AGP, RAM and of course the CPU core, which goes all the way up to 1.85v

The Abit µGuru technology is a combination of software utilities, and a specially made chip on the board itself. Luckily, it comes with its own manual to explain the functions. It acts as a system monitor, software overclocking utility, BIOS update utility, and system event and status recorder. None of these things are unique to Abit, but the amount of control it offers is impressive. It also dispenses with the need to reboot dozens of times, and speeds up the process of finding your hardware's limits.

At £69.78, the KV8 Pro is extremely good value for money. If you are looking for high performance, a working AGP and PCI lock, and plenty of overclocking potential, this board offers it all for a very fair price.

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