Abit AN8 Fatal1ty SLI Socket939 AMD motherboard review
by solo

Introduction

Abit is a company that has always catered for the “enthusiast” user. Less than two years ago they were producing some of the top overclocking motherboards around. Two of these in particular went on to become legends. They were the Abit IC7 an Intel Socket 478 Pentium 4 based board and the other was the Abit NF7 an AMD Socket A nForce2 based board.

When Engineer Oscar Wu (well know amongst the overclocking community) left them and moved over to DFI is was definitely a sad day for Abit loyalists. However, not being one to rest on their laurels Abit quickly set about reclaiming some of their glory and part of that strategy was to launch their range of Fatal1ty products.

With the aid of World Champion gamer Jonathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel they released their new Fatal1ty lineup targeting the gaming market in particular. The Abit AN8 is based on the NForce4 chipset and there are no less than 7 versions of this board (AN8, AN8-3rd Eye, AN8 Ultra, AN8 V2.0, AN8 SLI, AN8-V and the Fatal1ty AN8 SLI.)

Today I will be looking at the top of the range AN8 SLI Fatal1ty motherboard. Based on the features alone it promises to be a very exciting product. Does it deliver? Let’s take a look.

Specifications

PRODUCT PAGE

CPU

- Supports AMD Socket 939 Athlon 64/64FX Processors
- With 2GHz system bus using Hyper Transport™ technology
- Supports AMD CPU Cool 'n' Quiet Technology

Chipset

- NVIDIA NF4 SLI single chip
- NVIDIA Gigabit Ethernet with NVIDIA Firewall
- Supports NV SATA 3G RAID

NVIDIA SLI Technology

- Two PCI-Express X16 slots 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

- ABIT µGuru™ 2003 Technology
- ABIT OTES™ Technology
- ABIT AudioMAX™ Technology
- ABIT CPU ThermalGuard™ Technology

NV SATA RAID

- Serial ATA 3Gbps data transfer rate
- Supports SATA RAID 0/1/0+1

NV GbE LAN

- NVIDIA Gigabit Ethernet
- NVIDIA Secure Networking Engine

NV Firewall

- Native NVIDIA Firewall

IEEE1394

- Support IEEE 1394 at 400 Mb/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 2.88 MB
- 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

Form Factor

- ATX form factor 305 x 245mm

The Package



The box itself is large and pretty striking.



Once you lift the lid you are greeted by the Fatal1ty marketing strategy with the bold “Built To Kill” promise. I'm guessing it's gaming related.



The contents are neatly packaged and unlike other SLI boards I’ve tested so far the SLI card is not placed in the motherboard yet. There are three boxes in the main box. This is the first. The second contains the uGuru Panel and the third the manuals and cables.



Here is our first glimpse of the uGuru Panel. Something you’ll see I like very much later on.



The documentation that comes with the board is very good. Abit go into great detail on how to set up your new board. There is also a separate manual detailing the workings of the uGuru Panel as well as an autographed Thank You note from Jonathan if that makes you happy.

The complete list includes:

• 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
• Driver CD, SATA Utility Disk x 1
• A5 standard User's Manual x 1, B5 multilingual Quick Installation Guide x 1
• Jumper Setting Label x 1
• SLI Cooler



It is really not easy getting a good shot of a motherboard at night so bare with me. The layout has its good and bad points. The top 4 pin power connector is well placed. The 24 pin ATX connector is a little further down than I like it to be, but not a train smash. At first I liked the 4 pin Molex connector for the SLI PCI-Express bus being right at the bottom, until I realized you have to get the cable from the PSU down there, which can be awkward. My single ATI X850XT with IceQ II cooling could not clear the chipset heat sink fan which seems a little higher than one the DFI.

There is no problem getting the memory modules out with the graphics cards in. At the bottom there is a two digit POST code display and the various codes are listed in the manual. One problem I did have installing the motherboard was that the bottom right hole is partially obscured by the second IDE connector making it, well impossible to get a screw in there.

The board makes use of high quality Japanese Rubicon capacitors and is a very pleasing dark red colour. The back of the back is illuminated by red LED lights.



The chipset heat sink might be “All-copper” as advertised on the packaging, but I’m not too happy with design itself. It kind of looks out of place on the board in my opinion and I would have liked to see something I bit more modern if you know what I mean. As I said, that’s my opinion.



The OTES cooling covering the mosfets draws air over the large heat sinks and out of the case via the rear panel.



The OTES fans take up a large portion of the rear plate and as a result there are no parallel or serial ports. At first I was baffled as to why the fans were not turning. I thought just maybe they weren’t plugged in. I checked and they were. After some more digging I noticed in the OC Guru software settings that it has a threshold of 40’C i.e. they only start spinning when the temps there reach 40’C. Well I was using the huge Zalman CU7700 HSF which pretty much cools everything in the immediate area as well. Therefore I thought this was keeping the mosfets cool. However after putting on the stock AMD heat sink the temps were still too low for them to startup. Eventually I had to manually start the fans in the OC Guru settings, well because I wanted them to turn. Hehe.

There is only one Gigabit LAN port.



The 7.1 AudioMAX card is basically a little “daughter board”. By isolating these components it is supposed to offer better sound quality i.e. no interference from other components on the motherboard. The audio is supplied by the high quality Realtek ALC850 chip.



Instead of the OTES RAMflow cooler the package contained this nifty little device called the OTES SLIpstream VGA cooler. A device to make sure your cards get adequate cooling during many hours of gaming.

Hardware

Abit AN8 SLI Fatal1ty Athlon64 Socket 939 motherboard (BIOS 13)
AMD Athlon64 FX55 processor
Chaintech NVIDIA 6600GT graphics cards x 2
Mushkin (Winbond BH5) DDR433 (2 x 256MB) / PQI Turbo (Samsung TCCD) DDR400
Hitachi SATA II 250 GIG 7200 RPM Hard Drive (See my review over HERE)
Antec SmartPower2 500 WATT 24 Pin Power Supply (See my review over HERE)
Zalman CNPS7700-Cu (See my review over HERE)

Software

Windows XP Pro SP2 (32 Bit Edition) / Windows XP Pro (64 Bit Edition)
NVIDIA NForce 4 Standalone 6.53 (32 Bit) / NVIDIA NForce 4 Standalone 6.56 (64 Bit) chipset drivers
NVIDIA Forceware 71.89 (32Bit) drivers / NVIDIA Forceware 76.80 (64 Bit) drivers
Sandra
Realtek 3.73 (32 and 64 Bit) Audio drivers
3DMark2001 (330) / 3DMark03 (360) / 3DMark05 (120) / Aquamark 3
Doom3
Sandra 2005(1050)
PCMark04 (130)
Everest Home Edition 2
Sciencemark 2 (32 and 64 Bit Editions)
Cinebench 2003 (32 and 64 Bit Editions)
SuperPI 1.4 Moded

Benchmarks

Synthetic gaming

All the synthetic gaming and Doom3 benchmarks were run with two Chaintech 6600GT graphics cards in SLI. The cards run at a core frequency of 500 MHz and a memory clock speed of 1000 MHz. The Forceware drivers were set to Maximum Performance wherever possible.

3DMark05 (120)

6656

3DMark03 (360)

14395

3DMark2001 (330)

24203

Aquamark 3

77481

Doom3 performance

High Quality (1280 x 1024)

98.5 FPS – No AA
51.5 FPS – 4 x AA

Sandra synthetic testing

CPU = 11948
Multi Media = 24806
Memory Bandwidth = 6029

PCMark04 (130)

4711

Everest 2 Home Edition

Memory Read – 5662 MB/s
Memory Write – 1651 MB/s
Memory Latency – 49.7 ns

Sciencemark 2

Memory Bandwidth = 5479
Molecular Dynamics = 64
Primordia = 347

Cinebench 2003

71.9 seconds

Accessories

uGuru Panel



I love this panel. The inclusion of this panel adds to the motherboards price yes, but well worth it in my opinion. It fits into an open 5.25” bay in the front of your case and has a plethora of useful readings.

These include:

Fan speeds
Temperature readings
Voltage readings
Time
MSN and email message notification (Yes it will tell you when you have email!)

Besides the Firewire and USB cables the main cable that connects to the panels splits in two. The one 4 pin connector connects to a 4 pin monitoring port on the mother board. The other one requires you to remove the clear CMOS jumper and connects to these three pins. This is the one that allows you to reset the BIOS from the panel.

Here is comes ..... the CMOS reset button.



One press of the bottom would be the same as moving the “jumper” to pins 2 + 3 and effectively clearing the CMOS. A second press and the “jumper” would be back to pin 1 + 2. A very useful feature indeed.

The light can also be turned off on the LCD display.

uGuru Software

The uGuru software is very powerful. It allows you to monitor all the fans speeds on the Abit AN8 as well as change any of the voltages from within Windows. Very handy for overclocking in particular.





This post has been edited by solo: Jun 7 2005, 01:52 PM

Hard Drive Performance (SATA 300)

The NVIDIA NForce 4 SLI chipset supports the new SATA II. SATA II or more accurately SATA 300 offers speeds of 300 MB/s over the old 150 MB/s SATA 150. Although in reality you will not actually see a full 300 MB/s it does offer a nice tangible boost in performance as you can see in my review over HERE.



This is on par with the average HDTach SATA 300 figures I’ve seen so far.

The BIOS

Like with the DFI NF4 you can tweak here to your hearts content. The one option that will stand out immediately is the 3.55 Volts available for the memory. Even though almost none of the voltage loving modules are readily available locally, there are many members here who have sourced them over the last two years or so. Of course I’m talking about modules based on the Winbond BH5 chips.

Other highlights include.

VCore up to 1.82V (not 100% sure now though, lost me screen shot sorry)
DDR Voltages from 2.5 – 3.55V
DDR VTT : 1.25V - 1.75V & DDR/2
nForce4 voltage: 1.4 – 1.8V
Hyper Transport Voltage: 1.2 – 1.35V
DDR Ref. Voltage: -60 to +60
CPU Ref. Voltage: -60 to +60

RAM Options



Overclocking

If you were amused by the “Built to Kill” statement on the box then you might not be smiling as much once you see the results below.

Having said that though do not confuse the normal AN8 and Ultra editions with the SLI version. The other two have more limited overclocking abilities. For example only 2.8 volts on the memory which is not going to get you very far at all. I’m not 100% sure about the non-Fatal1ty SLI version as yet. But, it is rumoured to offer the same options at the Fatal1ty version.

I tested the AN8 SLI with two popular memory modules. The voltage loving Winbond BH5 chips and Samsung TCCD modules which actually dislike very high voltages.

Winbond BH5 testing (Mushkin Level II Black DDR433)

Leaving the memory timings set to Auto in the BIOS and using 2.8 Volts I installed Windows. Once installed the default setting used was 2-2-2-5 which is correct for these modules. I left it at these timings.

After gradually upping the voltage I was finally at 3.55 Volts and a memory speed of 266 MHz while maintain the timings of 2-2-2-6! This was stable in SuperPI 1 million, 3DMark2001 and Sciencemark Promordia tests.





Very, very impressive.

Samsung TCCD testing (PQI Turbo DDR400)

Same as with the BH5 I left the BIOS set to Auto. However these modules were picked up as 2-3-3-6 even though they can also do 2-2-2-6 at stock speeds. These particular modules have hit 300 MHz+ on both my DFI NF3 Socket754 and MSI K8N Neo2 Socket939 before with timings of 3-3-3. All be it not 100% stable. On the Abit AN8 SLI they failed to reach the same speeds and required some tweaking to get them as high as I did. The maximum result was 290 MHz at 2.5-4-3-7.

SEE IMAGE

A big thanks to tictac for posting the recommended settings that got me there.

Highest HTT frequency

In order to find the highest HTT frequency I set the memory to use a 200MHz divider. From reading some reviews on the AN8 I knew people have been hitting over 300 MHz with no sweat. I started with 300 MHz set in the BIOS (7x CPU multiplier) and using NF4 Clockgen I was soon sitting at 350 MHz. I rebooted setting it to 350 MHz in the BIOS. I then proceeded to up it further with Clockgen running SuperPI 1 million each time. The board finally topped out at a very respectable 371 MHz.



Also very impressive.

Despite the lackluster (well to me at least) TCCD performance the Abit AN8 SLI delivers some very good overclocking figures. More than enough to keep the hardened overclocker happy.

Windows XP Pro 64 Bit compatibility testing

The 64 Bit version of Windows is now available commercially and a lot of people have been asking about driver support. Therefore, as before I am including some 64 Bit testing.

Using the NVIDIA NForce 4 Standalone 6.56 (64 Bit) chipset drivers, the Forceware 76.80 (64 Bit) drivers as well as the Realtek 3.73 (64 bit) drivers all the hardware used functioned without any problems.

Some 32 Bit results versus their 64 Bit comparison ones.



Lower is better in this test and as you can see again the 64 Bit app’s are performing better in the 64 Bit environment.



Aquamark 3 does not run under WinXP 64. As in my other SLI review in 3DMark03 and 05 there is an improvement in the scores.

Conclusion

The good

SLI compatible (can be used as platform for top gaming rig)
Plenty BIOS option (tweak away)
Excellent overclocking performance
Extra cooling for stability (Mosfet and SLI cooling)
Supports SATA 300
uGuru Panel is practical and useful not just a gimmick
uGuru software offers tons of tweaking within Windows and system monitoring
Cool red lighting (you’ll definitely turns heads at the LAN)
Gigabit LAN
High quality onboard audio

The not so good

Only 4 SATA ports
Only one LAN port
Pricey compared to current SLI motherboards (but the uGuru panel makes up for it in my opinion) Retails slightly over the R2000 mark.
Currently no Abit NVIDIA SLI graphics cards to team it with.

Final Words

I have to admit I find the idea of an Abit “Fatal1ty” SLI board a bit amusing actually. The reason? Well currently Abit do not manufacture any NVIDIA based graphics cards so customers will have to look at another manufacturer to complete their setup. I can’t help but picture a complete Fatal1ty setup one day with two Abit NVIDIA cards and their temperatures being monitored on the uGuru panel as well. Just an idea.

As I mentioned in my introduction two of their past boards in particular have stood out. I myself have owned both of those boards, so I was most eager to try their new generation nForce4 SLI offering. Personally I think Abit have done a terrific job with this SLI board. From the eye candy red light illuminating the underside of the motherboard to its excellent overclocking abilities. It’s been a long time since I have enjoyed a motherboard this much.

Links that might interest.

UPDATED - AN8 Ultra and AN8 SLI versions reviewed here

Fatal1ty Website
RAM with TCCD Listing
RAM known to use Winbond BH5

This post has been edited by solo: Jun 18 2005, 07:08 AM

Awesome Review once again Solo,

This is awesome - OTES SLIpstream VGA cooler.

Nice review on our cards as well lol

Very nice review solo!

Got me thinking now, looks like a more wiser choice then the DFI rival!

Thx man,care to pm me with price?

Very nice review Solo

This board seems to be quite amazing, has the looks and performs well .
I aslo really love the cmos feature on the uGuru Panel, now why cant DFI have this would really come in handy when benching.

Also like the OTES SLIpstream VGA cooler, im sure i can make one for myself.

Why does solo do this, makes me wanna spend
and as always another excellent review by solo

Thanks for the comments guys

Don't worry I also wish I had some spare money to add this beauty to my collection. Imagine this board and I couple or red case fans

Excellenct review Solo - TOPS!! Thanks!

I'm glad to see you really liked the uGuru Panel. I've always thought that if I had to get a board with the option of the uGuru Panel, would it be worth getting it.

Thanks again for an awesome review Solo!

Very nice review there solo and I hope you keep up the good work.

Also good to a see abit giving dfi a run for it money, this should keep both company's pumping out new ideas. And also hopefully quality products.

aaaaaaaggggggggghhhhhhhhhh crap now I want one

Great review solo!!!

Does the guru panel come with backlight?

PS.. The half naked pics of Fatal1ty on his home page is kinda....

Thanks.

You mean like so.

Great review solo. Makes me want one. I still have a nF7, and I love it.

i see you getting some exposure on futuremark as well

see here

Hehe. Way cool.

But, as they say if the LED's are not your thing there is a plain SLI version as well.

Another Proudly South-African Review. Great going Solo.

Great review solo!

This board looks like a worthy challenger to DFI. I particularly liked the control panel and the OTES SLIpstream VGA cooler

(Does anyone know if there are similar products to this cooler on the market and how much it costs?)

I dont think theres anything similar to the OTES SLIpstream VGA cooler on the market right now, and if there would i dont think you would be able to get it in S.A.

If you have a look at it its quite simple and you can try make it yourself.

Yea... I was thinking about using something like a modded fan card. Only problem is the connection to the case... will have to use some sort of perspex or plastic mould with holes drilled I think...

Nice to see you hold the records Solo



Source

Well done.