Introduction and Specifications
As a revived company emerging from the ashes, Abit has released the third SLI X16 motherboard for the AMD platform on to the market.
With all the news and suspicion surrounding Abit over the last year or so, I really thought my review of the Abit Fatal1ty AN8-SLI motherboard would have been my last look at Abit’s technology. That turned out not to be the case when a wealthy company stepped in and saved the Abit name from disgrace and further humiliation by injecting some strong cash flow and liveliness back into its bloodstream.
After a surprise email from an Abit email address, we soon had the new Abit AN8 32X motherboard based on NVIDIA’s nForce4 SLI X16 chipset in our hands ready for testing. I was eager to see what Abit’s engineers (or what was left of them) could pull off and if it would live up to the name that Abit had built over the past 10 or so years.
Specifications (from Abit-usa.com)
  Processor– Supports Socket 939 Athlon64/ 64FX/ 64X2 Processor – 2GHz system bus using Hyper Transport™ Technology – Supports AMD CPU Cool ‘n’ Quiet Technology | |
| Chipset – NVIDIA® NF4 SLI X16 / NF4 SLI Chipset |
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| Memory – Four 184-pin DIMM sockets – Supports Dual channel DDR 400 ECC/non-ECC un-buffered memory – Supports maximum memory capacity up to 8GB |
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| NVIDIA SLI Technology – Two PCI-Express X16 slots support NVIDIA Scalable Link Interface – Two full-bandwidth 16-lane PCI Express |
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| NV SATAII 3Gb/s RAID – Supports 4 ports SATAII 3Gb/s RAID 0/1/0+1/5 – Supports SATA AHCI, providing native command queuing & native hot plug |
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| 2nd SATA RAID – Serial ATA 3Gbps by Sil 3132 PCIE controller – Supports SATA RAID 0/1 NCQ |
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| Audio – On board 7.1 CH Audio CODEC (ALC850) – Supports auto jack sensing and optical S/PDIF In/Out |
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| NV GbE – NVIDIA® Gigabit Ethernet with NV Firewall ActiveArmor |
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| IEEE1394 – Supports IEEE1394a |
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| Internal I/O Connectors – 2 x PCI Express x16 (two full-bandwidth 16-lane PCI Express) – 2 x PCI Express x1, 2 x PCI slots – 1 x Floppy port supports up to 2.88MB – 6 x SATA connectors – 2 x Ultra DMA 133/100/66/33 connectors – 3 x USB 2.0 headers, 1 x IEEE 1394 header – 1 x Guru Link™ |
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| Back Panel I/O – 1 x PS/2 Keyboard, 1 x PS/2 Mouse – 4 x USB ports, 1 x RJ-45 LAN port, 1 x IEEE 1394 – 1 x S/P DIF In, 1 x S/P DIF Out  |
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| Dimension – ATX form factor 305 x 245mm |
