When a company like Abit, known for producing overclockable motherboards, gets together with one of the world's top gamers, then you can guess that the end result should be something pretty special. The company's new flagship Socket 939 board, the Fatal1ty AN8, is just that.

Well engineered, it's a stable board with enough LEDs to keep modders happy and a BIOS full of overclocking features for the enthusiastic tweaker and gamer. It's not as feature-rich as some motherboards out there, but then again it's aimed at gamers who want stability rather than fancy bits and pieces, so this is no real surprise.

Based around nVidia's nForce4 Ultra chipset, the first thing that catches the eye is the combination of colours Abit has used. Red and black dominate the PCB, giving the Fatal1ty AN8 a chance to stand out in the crowd. That's before you notice the row of red LEDs sitting around the underside of the board, so it cries out to be put in a case with a clear side panel. Dominating the rear I/O panel are the dual 40mm fans for the OTES cooling solution for the heatsinks on the MOSFETS.

The board itself is well laid out with enough room around all the major components. There's plenty of room around the CPU socket to fit a third-party cooler should it be needed, while the chipset is positioned above the x16 PCI-E graphics slot and is cooled actively by a low-profile fan. Should you go in for some serious overclocking, then the positioning of the chipset is in your favour, as there is room to swap the low profile standard cooler for an after-market solution.

Both the two ATA/133 ports and the main ATX power connector are mounted towards the edge of the board, allowing for tidier cable runs. To help with this the two drive ports are also side-mounted.

On the features side of things, the Fatal1ty AN8 looks at first glance to be a little lacking - there aren't many extra chips on the board - but under the skin the nVidia chipset provides most of what you need. Aside from the two ATA ports mentioned previously, there are four SATA ports, for which the chipset provides SATA II support.

This means they can support both NCQ (Native Command Queuing) and Western Digital's TCQ (Tagged Command Queuing). Not only that, but with the help of nVida's NVRAID solution, both the ATA and SATA ports can be combined into a RAID array supporting RAID 0, 1, 0+1 or JBOD arrays.

You also get integrated Gigabit Ethernet, but unlike a lot of its competitors, the Fatal1ty AN8 has just a single controller, not the Dual Gigabit controllers and/or Wi-Fi of a lot of motherboards in this price range.

As well as the PCI-E graphics slot, there are two x1 PCI-E slots and three standard PCI slots, plus a slot for the included AudioMax riser card, which is needed as the Fatal1ty AN8 doesn't have integrated audio. Disappointingly this card uses only a six-channel Realtek chip, not the commonly used eight-channel chip of most high-end boards. Then again, gamers might not be too concerned.

One area where you'd expect a board like the Fatal1ty AN8 to score is in the BIOS, and it doesn't disappoint. There are adjustments for the clock frequency generator, the PCI-E bus can be tweaked from 100 to 145MHz in 1MHz steps, there's CPU multiplier adjustment, CPU, memory, chipset and DDR VTT voltage adjustment and both the frequency and width of the HyperTransport bus can be adjusted.

Verdict
It may lack some of the features of its closest competitors, but Abit's Fatal1ty AN8 is aimed primarily at gamers and those people who like to squeeze the last drop of performance out of a motherboard, something that the BIOS on this board has been designed to support.

Company: Abit

Contact: 01438 228888

Tags: pci express serial ata tagged command queuing conventional pci nvidia atx hardware intel corporation