Intro/Packaging/Layout
Abit’s Fatal1ty line has become the “Mac Daddy” of motherboards- not only does it look awesome but it also provides tweaking and overclocking options like nothing else on the market. Today we take a look at the Fatal1ty A8N-SLI board from Abit based on the nVidia nForce4 SLI for the Athlon64 platform.
Packaging
We like it when manufacturers read their product reviews and work on reasonable suggestions. In our last review of a Fatal1ty board, we mentioned that the big size box would be a lot easier to carry if Abit had attached a handle and they do exactly that with the AN8-SLI. The rather large and black box now looks great and is easy to carry.
Flipping it open shows some cut outs that show actual parts of the motherboard which certainly adds to the look. Abit lists some of the boards features and specifications inside and on the back cover. The actual packaging inside the flip is still white in color- we would love for Abit to make this black as that will certainly add a lot to the look.
Like all Fatality boards, the inside packing is divided into three sections- one that holds the board, the second one holds the user manuals, the drivers CD and all the cables such as SATA, rounded IDE and floppy cables. The third section on the A8N-SLI holds the SLI dual graphics OTES cooling fan as well as the uGuru Panel- more on this later.
Layout
We love the red color and red lights that Abit uses for their Fatal1ty series- it just looks better than any other board out there. We also like Abit’s use of black and red onboard slots and connectors and thus, we’re not sure why Abit used a bit of a blue for some connectors (like IDE and USB) when they could’ve been black or red. We normally wouldn’t point something like this out but this is the Fatal1ty board we’re talking about and looks are important.
Abit does well with the placement of onboard sockets and slots. The CPU socket has some room around it and we had no problems installing our Thermaltake HSF unit. The main power connector is positioned next to the memory sockets while the 12V four pin connector is placed above the CPU socket- a reasonable place as it prevents any cable clutter.
For expansion, Abit puts two 32 bit PCI slots, two x16 PCI-E slots and two x1 PCI-E slots. An additional proprietary slot takes the included audio module. Abit does well to place the x16 PCI-E slots away from the memory sockets however the two x16 slots, like most motherboards, are close to each other. We like ASUS’ implementation in this regard with a wider gap between the two x16 PCI-E slots and think that Abit should also adopt this for their Fatal1ty series.
Abit places the IDE connectors bent at ninety degrees towards the lower half of the board along with the SATA connectors. While these are placed ok, we’re not too crazy about the floppy connector at the bottom of the board. The clearing CMOS jumper and all the USB and firewire headers are conveniently located towards the bottom of the board as well and we certainly like Abit’s use of tall jumpers.
Features/BIOS/Stability
Features
Abit usually doesn’t overload their boards with onboard features and the same holds true for the A8N-SLI. Based on the nForce4 SLI chip, it supports everything this chip is capable of such as 3.0Gb/s SATA II with RAID support, Gigabit Ethernet with Active Armor firewall and operating in SLI mode with two identical nVidia graphics cards supporting SLI.
On top of that, Abit adds a VIA Firewire controller and an add-on sound card supporting eight channel output and SPDIF output. While Abit doesn’t add additional RAID or Network controllers onboard, they do provide quite a bit of extra stuff in the box such as a fan for cooling an SLI setup which rests on top of your two video cards and either blows air on them or sucks air out of ‘em- depending on how you fix it.
Another edition to the AN8-SLI is the uGuru panel which is a front panel that slides into your 5 ¼” bay and offers an interesting mix of options that includes two USB ports, a Firewire port and audio input/output jacks. Abit also puts the clearing CMOS jumper which can be accessed by lifting a cover and pressing the button- kinda like how you see missiles launched in movies- uber cool! Lastly, the huge backlit LCD display on the panel shows quite a bit of information. It allows you to monitor and adjust some of the overclocking settings like FSB speeds, CPU and memory voltages and fan speeds. The LCD also shows notification for any MSN or email messages- again, very cool.
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We like the idea of the uGuru panel but do have a couple of suggestions for Abit. First off, they should bundle a couple of different colored face plates as not everyone will have a black chassis. Secondly, you have four different cables running from the back of the uGuru panel and going into different parts of the motherboard- a nightmare for someone who practices cable management 101. It would be great if Abit could bundle all these cables into one and have a dedicated spot on the motherboard for it.
BIOS
True to Abit style, the AN8-SLI has all the bells and whistles you’d come to expect of an Abit board. The Soft Menu allows you to tweak tons of settings. Starting off with memory tweaking, Abit provides all the commonly used options as well as some not so common- check out the screenshot on the left. You can also adjust the frequency of modules to un-official speeds of DDR433, DDR466 and DDR500. We played with this option at DDR466 speed and only noticed an increase in memory benchmarking applications like SiSoft Sandra but no real impact on games or other standard applications.
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Moving on to the overclocking side of things, you’d pretty much find everything you need to overclock your system with the AN8-SLI. Abit allows you to adjust the CPU multiplier which is helpful as all Athlon64 CPUs are unlocked (by going lower than the default multiplier) while FSB speeds of as high as 410MHz are supported. To reach such high FSB speeds, you definitely need additional voltage and Abit provides you plenty of voltage in every department. The memory modules can be fed upto an astonishing 3.4V while voltages for CPU, HTT and the chipset are also available.
Using standard air-cooling, we were only able to overclock our X2-4800 CPU to 260MHz FSB on this board by lowering the multiplier and the CPU:Memory ratio. While this is not exactly killer overclocking, a lot of factors depend on how far you reach and your results could be a lot different than ours.
Stability
We had absolutely no problems with the stability of the Fatal1ty AN8-SLI. Abit shipped it with a BIOS that didn’t support dual core CPUs but the latest one on their website does and once we flashed it, we were up and running without any problems. We tried a few different graphics cards and memory modules with the setup and it handled everything well. The copper based fan on the nForce4 chip and the two on the back panel certainly help in keeping temperatures down on the board.
Testbed
| CPU: |
AMD Athlon64 X2 4800+ CPU |
| Memory: |
2 x 512MB Corsair DDR400 Memory Module |
| VGA Card: |
nVidia GeForce 7800GTX Reference Card |
| Optical/Hard Drives: |
Generic 8X DVDRW, Maxtor 80GB 7200RPM/8MB Cache SATA |
| Monitor: |
Relisys 19" Monitor |
| Operating System: |
Windows XP Professional SP2 |
| Motherboard Drivers: |
nVidia nForce 6.66 |
| VGA Drivers: |
nVidia Forceware 77.72 |
Our Corsair memory works very well at DDR400 speeds with SPD values of 2.0-2-2-5 which is what was used to benchmark all boards in this roundup. We now benchmark everything 1280x1024 resolution (except for 3DMarks/Aquamark) as we feel that this is the resolution most of our viewers use. For comparison, we've chosen the nForce4 SLI based DFI LAN Party nF4-SLI. The following applications were used to test these boards.
| CPU/Memory/HD: |
PC Mark '05, SiSoft Sandra 2005 |
| Graphics Benchmarks: |
3D Mark 2001SE, 3D Mark 2003, 3D Mark 2005, and Aquamark3- Default Settings. |
| Full Games: |
Battlefield 2, Counterstrike: Source, Doom 3, Far Cry and UT2004 at 1280x1024 resolution |
| Audio/Video Encoding: |
WorldBench: Jukebox, WB: Microsoft Media Encoder, WB: Adobe Premiere, AutoGK with Pirates of Carribian DVD |
| General Applications: |
WorldBench: Adobe Photoshop, Ahead Nero, Microsoft Office, Mozilla and Winzip |
| 3D Workstation: |
Cinibench 2003, 3D Studio Max 7 with SPECapc |
If you would like for us to add any additional benchmarking software, please email us at suggestions@tbreak.com
PC Mark/Sandra
3D Marks/Aquamark
Gaming Benchmarks
Photoshop/Office/Nero/Mozilla/Winzip
| WB: Adobe Photoshop |
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| Product |
Score |
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Difference |
| DFI LanParty NF4-SLI |
312 |
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+1% |
| Abit Fatal1ty AN8-SLI |
314 |
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| WB: Ahead Nero |
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| Product |
Score |
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Difference |
| Abit Fatal1ty AN8-SLI |
496 |
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| DFI LanParty NF4-SLI |
497 |
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0% | |
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| WB: Microsoft Office |
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| Product |
Score |
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Difference |
| Abit Fatal1ty AN8-SLI |
495 |
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| DFI LanParty NF4-SLI |
501 |
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-1% | |
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| WB: Mozilla |
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| Product |
Score |
|
Difference |
| Abit Fatal1ty AN8-SLI |
325 |
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| DFI LanParty NF4-SLI |
328 |
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-1% | |
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| WB: Winzip |
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| Product |
Score |
|
Difference |
| Abit Fatal1ty AN8-SLI |
362 |
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| DFI LanParty NF4-SLI |
375 |
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-4% | |
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Multi Tasking
| MT: Media Encoder + Mozilla |
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| Product |
Score |
|
Difference |
| Abit Fatal1ty AN8-SLI |
402 |
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| DFI LanParty NF4-SLI |
404 |
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0% | |
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Audio/Video Encoding
| WB: Music Match Jukebox MP3 Encoding |
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| Product |
Score |
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Difference |
| DFI LanParty NF4-SLI |
448 |
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+1% |
| Abit Fatal1ty AN8-SLI |
454 |
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| WB: Adobe Premiere |
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| Product |
Score |
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Difference |
| Abit Fatal1ty AN8-SLI |
422 |
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| DFI LanParty NF4-SLI |
423 |
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0% | |
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| WB: Microsoft Windows Media Encoder |
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| Product |
Score |
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Difference |
| DFI LanParty NF4-SLI |
269 |
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0% |
| Abit Fatal1ty AN8-SLI |
270 |
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3D Workstation Performance
| 3D Studio Max 7: Single Pipe 2 |
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| Product |
Score |
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Difference |
| DFI LanParty NF4-SLI |
84.46 |
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0% |
| Abit Fatal1ty AN8-SLI |
84.56 |
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| 3D Studio Max 7: Underwater Animation |
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| Product |
Score |
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Difference |
| Abit Fatal1ty AN8-SLI |
26.93 |
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| DFI LanParty NF4-SLI |
27.03 |
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0% | |
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Conclusion
Conclusion
The Fatal1ty AN8-SLI is targeted purely towards the enthusiast who likes to make a good looking system and then overclock the hell out it and Abit surely succeeds with that. The packaging is also excellent with lots of extras included in the box such as the uGuru panel and the SLI cooling fan- although we do hope that Abit takes care of the multiple cables coming out of the uGuru panel and replaces them with one. It would also be good if Abit thinks about increasing the space between the two PCI-E x16 slots for their upcoming multi GPU boards and keeps all slots/conenctors black or red.
As seen on the previous few pages, the board does well with all the applications we tested on it and although our particular board didnt overclock as well as we would've liked it to, Abit does provide all the options and uses high quality components to extract the best out of your hardware. Stability was also not an issue with the Fatal1ty AN8-SLI and Abit's usage of the copper HSF on the nForce4 chip as well as the two fans on the back panel help keep the system cool. Of course, such luxury does come at a price- expect to shell out almost $200 for it but what you’re getting in return is surely worth in our opinion.
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