X-bit labs

ABIT Fatal1ty AN8 mainboard on NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra Chipset: Built to Kill (page 15)

Category: Mainboards

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

Conclusion

All in all, ABIT Fatal1ty AN8 mainboard makde a very good impression. This is the first Socket 939 product supporting PCI Express bus without any serious bugs, which boasts excellent design and efficient CPU overclocking options. Here i would also like to add that ABIT Fatal1ty AN8 inherited all the advantages of the NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra. It offers very good sound quality, allows intellectual management of the fans rotation speeds and simply looks stylish.

This way ABIT Fatal1ty AN8 mainboard can be considered a good choice for a gaming or overclocking Socket 939 system. We found that the price of the board was unfortunately a little too high, from our points of view. It is now selling for around $190-$200. However, you do have to pay for the quality, that’s for sure.

Highs:

• High reliability and stability;
• Excellent fucntions for system fine tuning and overclocking, great overclocking potential;
• Good AudioMax Technology sound solution;
• Cool’n’Quiet and FanEQ technologies support, sot hat you can adjust the rotation speeds of the system fans depending on the temperature of different system knots;
• Stylish exterior;
• Excellent networking capabilities including ActiveArmor and NVIDIA FireWall 2.0;
• Four Serial ATA II channels and two Parallel ATA channels with RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 support;
• IEEE1394 support;
• POST-codes indicator.

Lows:

• High price;
• Low-quality fans;
• A few design flaws.

Having summed up our test results we here at X-bit labs decided to award ABIT Fatal1ty AN8 mainboard with the prestigious Editor’s Choice Title as the today’s Best PCI Express Socket 939 Platform for Enthusiasts: