Nothing helps the week to go by like just throwing ourselves right into a review mid-week. With this in mind, I thought that introducing you to this review of the Abit’s Socket 939 3rd Eye motherboard might just be in order.

Today we have 2 motherboards sporting AMD’s Socket 939. The first, Abit’s AV8 3rd Eye, uses Via’s K8T800Pro chipset. The second, Epox’s 9NDA3+, uses the Nvidia Nforce 3 Ultra. We’re pitting these two together to see which works out the better – whilst both Via and Nvidia have announced successors to the chipsets we’re working with here, you’ll still be hard pressed to actually buy them.

We’re comparing the boards side by side to evaluate their features as well as looking at how well they perform and overclock.

Abit’s Socket 939 3rd Eye motherboard the AV8 features VIA’s K8T800pro northbridge and VT8237 southbridge along with Abit’s 3rd eye and µGuru technology. All the connectors, including flopps and hard drive ports, are located around the edge of the board to help keep your case tidy. Abit include a LED readout for boot problem diagnosis: by cross referencing the Hex output to the manual when suffering a boot up problem, it can easily be identified.