>To me the biggest question of all is, will the KT-400A boards have a fixed PCI/AGP bus?
according to the
Asus A7V400 specs. "Adjustable FSB/DDR ratio, fixed AGP/PCI frequencies" so yes it has fixed AGP/PCI
>- gigabit ethernet onboard - serial ata w/ raid. can we expect these features on a board from any major manufacturer?
Yes, the A7V400 will have 2 x UltraDMA 133/100 and 2 x Serial ATA, RAID 0, RAID 1 or RAID 0+1 and Gigabit 3Com 3C940 1000 Mbps Ethernet controller.
"VIA claims boards using the VT1616 can produce higher quality audio than nForce2 boards"
"licensed from Sensaura. This licensing deal gets VIA access to the same suite of software audio technologies NVIDIA has licensed for the Xbox"
"The Sensaura drivers provide VT1616-based audio solutions a full range of positional audio features, including compatibility with all the major audio APIs: DirectSound3D, EAX 1.0/2.0, A3D 1.0, and I3DL2. Sensaura's software algorithms will, of course, require some CPU overhead, but VIA claims the impact on performance is fairly minimal."
The A7V400 will come with 1 x S/PDIF out connector
Don't forget that all kt400a benches were all made on early reference boards, all board manufacturers will get an updated final stepping before mass production.