Abit Fatal1ty AN8 SLI Tyldesley

For all his success and money, it's easy to knock Jonathan 'Fatal1ty' Wendell. After all, here's a man who has managed to become the world's most high-profile gamer by playing the computer game equivalent of Dodgeball. Who even plays Doom 3 online anyway? Maybe if Mr. Fatal1ty was the world number one in Counter-Strike: Source we'd be a little kinder, but he isn't, so we won't.

Sour grapes aside, Abit's latest Fatal1ty-branded motherboard, the AN8 SLI, makes a good first impression and not only because it's based on Nvidia's flagship nForce4 SLI chipset. The board is packed full of good features, but it's also very well laid out. Generally speaking, there's plenty of space between all the different components.

Unfortunately, Abit hasn't followed the lead of Asus and positioned the two high-speed PCI-E slots further apart, so it will be difficult to install two graphics cards with dual-slot coolers or waterblocks. Switching between SLI and single-card mode involves flipping a small circuitboard that sits in between the two high-speed PCI-E slots. This is quite a fiddly process and nowhere near as simple as MSI's digital SLI switch, but it's still the process used by the majority of SLI motherboards. In addition to the high-speed PCI-E slots, there are also two 1x PCI-E slots, one of which will be unusable if you install two graphics cards, and two PCI slots.

Also on the board are four DIMM slots that support up to 4GB of PC3200 memory, four RAID-capable S-ATA II ports, two EIDE ports and a floppy drive port. S-ATA II drives are fairly thin on the ground at the moment, but S-ATA II ports are backwards compatible with existing S-ATA drives.

Fatal1ty also lends his name to Creative Sound Blaster cards, so it's curious that this Abit motherboard doesn't integrate a Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit chip, as seen on MSI's P4N Diamond. Instead, there's a separate audio daughterboard that looks a bit like a sound card, but actually contains a Realtek ALC850 chip. It still provides 8-channel surround sound, though, and placing the audio ports on a separate board is a good idea, as it dramatically reduces clutter on the motherboard's back panel. It's also easy to disable the audio if you don't want to use it, as you simply don't install the daughterboard in the first place.

Also nestling on the motherboard's back panel are four USB 2 ports, a FireWire port, two PS/2 ports and an Ethernet port. The Ethernet port connects to a Gigabit Ethernet controller, which supports Nvidia's hardware firewall.

As the Fatal1ty is aimed at the l33t gamers' market, it's inevitably littered with an army of cooling gadgets and lights. This includes Abit's patented OTES (Outside Thermal Exhaust System) for cooling the voltage regulators, which comprises twin 40mm fans and an exhaust duct. The nForce4 chipset also has active cooling. Thankfully, all these fans are very well behaved. However, while cooling the VRMs and Northbridge is a good idea, we're not so convinced by the 'OTES SLIpstream fan'. This little gadget comprises a thin 70mm fan that sits across both graphics cards in SLI mode to provide some airflow to the cramped area between the cards. But rather than exhausting resources by designing cheesy gadgets, we'd rather Abit had spent the time increasing the space between the PCI-E slots, which would eliminate the need for a fan altogether.

However, fans with daft marketing names are only part of the equation. There's also an array of red LEDs on the underside of the motherboard, which provide a subtle red glow around the edge of the PCB, and yet more LEDs on the audio daughterboard and around the OTES cooler. This may sound like overkill, but the resulting cushion of red light these LEDs create actually looks very cool.

While the fans and LEDs are arguably superfluous, we're much more impressed with the Guru Panel. This sits in a spare 5.25in drive bay and connects to the motherboard, providing features such as on-the-fly overclocking and hardware monitoring. It also has two additional USB 2 ports, an extra FireWire port, and headphone and microphone jacks.

The front audio jacks are particularly handy, especially for folk who like to run Teamspeak2 or some other voice communications program, as it saves monkeying around at the back of the case to plug in your headset.

The Guru Panel also has a CMOS clearing switch, amusingly hidden underneath a flap bearing a nuclear hazard warning symbol. This allows you to reset the BIOS to its default settings without having to pop open the case and switch the jumper manually. As the Abit is aimed at people who are likely to do a lot of overclocking, this is a great feature.



PERFORMANCE

All the lights and fancy gizmos don't make any difference to performance, because at the end of the day, the Abit is still an nForce4 SLI motherboard. At stock speeds in our 2D benchmarks, it performed exactly as we'd expect, level-pegging with the motherboards from last month's megatest. The Far Cry score of 64.9fps at 1,280 x 1,024 with 2x AA and 2x AF is also what we'd expect.

However, we're not really interested in how the Abit performs at stock speeds - we're far more concerned with how it overclocks.

Unfortunately, this wasn't all plain sailing. In order to achieve a stable overclock, we had to reduce the CAS latency of our Corsair memory to 3, but as soon as we did this, the AN8 SLI delivered some fairly decent results. By lowering the multiplier of our CPU and whacking up the CPU voltage, the Abit topped out with a 300MHz FSB, which is very good, but not quite in the same league as the turbo-nutter 425MHz achieved by the DFI Lanparty NF4 SLI-DR .

Of course, in practice, you're unlikely to get anything close to this, and with our CPU back at its default multiplier, we achieved an FSB of 220MHz, which increased the frequency of our Athlon 64 3500+ from 2.2GHz to 2.42GHz. This provided a pretty substantial performance boost, increasing the Media Benchmarks scores to 1.41, 1.32 and 1.60 for audio ripping, video encoding and image editing respectively. Overclocking also increased the performance in Far Cry to 70.1fps, which is a little slower than most nForce4 boards we've tested, although this could be due to an early BIOS. Apart from overclocking, the rest of the BIOS is well featured, with plenty of fan-control and temperature-monitoring options.

CONCLUSION

In terms of performance and overclockability, the Abit does nothing to distinguish itself from the other nForce4 SLI boards available. At stock speeds, you don't lose anything, but it's not as overclockable as the excellent DFI and it's not quite as well designed or cheap as the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe.

However, the Abit does have distinguishing features, particularly the Guru Panel, and it also looks great and has some good BIOS features. If these factors are important to you then the Abit would provide a solid foundation for a powerful Athlon 64 PC.

However, in terms of overclockability, overall design and price, there are better boards out there.

Author: Phil Hartup

Abit Fatal1ty AN8 SLI