Abit Fatal1ty AN8-SLI AMD Motherboard Review

Introduction and Specifications

Abit has brought the Fatal1ty name to the AMD market with a new SLI product. With a great little bundle and lots of new and unique features.

Introduction

To many hardware followers it may seem like Abit’s partnership with the Fatal1ty group has been around forever, though our first review of a Fatal1ty-branded product was in January of this year.  That first review was of the Fatal1ty AA8XE motherboard based on the Intel 925XE chipset and proved to be a strong Intel-platform solution but landed far from being the “gamer’s choice” of boards if only because of the status of Intel’s processors.  It was too long before the engineers at Abit readied the Fatal1ty AN8 motherboard based on the nForce4 Ultra chipset on the AMD platform.  Still, being the “gamer’s dream” was a bit premature as the top technology for gaming at the time was SLI graphics cards, and the AN8 didn’t support that. 

Well now, with the release of the Fatal1ty AN8-SLI motherboard that we are reviewing today, Abit and Fatal1ty may actually have the gamer’s dream motherboard. 

Specifications (from Abit-usa.com)

Processor – Supports AMD Socket 939 Athlon 64/64FX & Athlon 64 X2 dual-core Processors – With 2GHz system bus using Hyper Transport™ technology – Supports AMD CPU Cool ‘n’ Quiet Technology Chipset – NVIDIA NF4 SLI single chip – Integrated NVIDIA Gigabit Ethernet and NVIDIA Firewall – Supports NV SATA 3G RAID NVIDIA SLI Technology – Two PCI-Express X16 slot support NVIDIA Scalable Link Interface – Increase bandwidth of the PCI Express™ bus providing 60x the bandwidth of PCI Memory – Four 184-pin DIMM sockets – Supports dual channel DDR400 non-ECC un-buffered memory – Supports maximum memory capacity up to 4GB ABIT Engineered Technology – ABIT uGuru™ 2003 Technology – ABIT OTES™ Technology – ABIT AudioMAX™ Technology – ABIT CPU ThermalGuard™ Technology NV SATA RAID – Serial ATA 3Gbps data transfer rate – Supports SATA150 RAID 0/1/0+1 NV GbE LAN – NVIDIA Gigabit Ethernet – NVIDIA Secure Networking Engine NV Firewall – Native NVIDIA Firewall IEEE 1394 – Support IEEE 1394 at 400Mb/s transfer rate ABIT AudioMAX – High quality 7.1-channel Audio Card – Optical S/P DIF Input/Output – Supports auto jack sensing Internal I/O Connectors – 2 x PCI Express X16, 2 x PCI Express X1, 2 x PCI slots, 1 x AudioMAX – Floppy Port supports up to 2.88MB – 2 x Ultra DMA 133/100/66/33 IDE Connectors – 4 x SATA 3G Connectors – 3 x USB headers, 1 x IEEE 1394 header Back Panel I/O – ABIT Dual OTES – 1 x PS/2 Keyboard, 1 x PS/2 mouse – 1 x IEEE 1394 – 4 x USB, 1 x RJ-45 LAN Connector Dimension – ATX form factor 305 x 245mm Package – Guru Panel – ABIT AudioMAX Card – SLI Connector Bridge – SLI Switch – SATA cable x 4, ATA 100 IDE Cable x 1, FDD cable x 1 – I/O shield x 1 – CD Title x 1, SATA Utility Disk x 1 – A5 standard User’s Manual x 1, B5 multilingual Quick Installation Guide x 1 – Jumper Setting Label x 1