X-bit labs

ABIT Fatal1ty AN8 mainboard on NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra Chipset: Built to Kill

Category: Mainboards

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 03/22/2005 | 06:16 PM ]

ABIT Company expands its gaming mainboards family aka Fatal1ty with a new Socket 939 solution on NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra chipset. Let’s take a closer look at this product with all those brand new technologies to find out how good it is as an ultimate gaming platform.

Table of contents:

• Specification
  
• Accessories
  
• Closer Look
  
• PCB Design
  
• BIOS and Overclocking
  
• Software
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance
  
• Conclusion
  

ABIT Company has been facing quite a few serious mishaps lately. In the US some users try to sue this company for leaking capacitors, in Taiwan ABIT’s top management is being accused of wheeler-dealer financing, all in all, not the best days ABIT is going through, for sure. However, luckily all these difficulties do not affect the company engineering team, which keeps working hard on designing new solutions for advanced overclocking fans and enthusiastic users.

Among the company R&D’s latest achievements I would like to point out a new product family aka fatal1ty, which owes its name to the nick-name of one of the world’s most famous cyber-champions – Jonathan Wendel. Jonathan won his title in numerous Quake 3, DOOM 3 and Unreal Tournament shoot-outs, where he has been an undefeated champion for a few years running. Now the Fatal1ty name is proudly carried by ABIT’s flagship mainboards where Jonathan also contributes a lot to the development.

“Ultimate hardware from Ultimate Gamer” - this is the slogan for the Fatal1ty mainboards positioned as solutions for powerful gaming systems. These mainboard have to be highly stable, reliable and should offer very high performance and extensive opportunities for successful and efficient CPU overclocking.

That is why when our lab got an ABIT Fatal1ty AN8 mainboard based on the today’s best chipset for AMD Athlon 64 processors – NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra, we couldn’t help testing it right away. So, let’s take a closer look at this exciting “Pro gaming Motherboard”.