A first glance at Abits AN8 “Fatal1ty” mobo

[Agent]

Ahhh, nothing like waking up in the morning to the sound of a knocking door, grabbing your dressing gown and racing to the door before the delivery bloke slips a “sorry we missed you” card through your door.
It was my parcel from the lovely people over at Scan, an Abit fatal1ty AN8 motherboard.
I don’t have the other parts yet, so no benches or anything else yet, but here are some pics for you to have a look at:

Packaging…







Must say, attention to detail here is superb. I wonder how necessary it is though. This board is aiming at high end gaming users, probably of which the majority will do research on the best board for them, and order online, so packaging in that case would be irrelevant.
I wonder if the high street stores such as PC World will be stocking this on their shelves. If they do, it would certainly be an eye catcher. Then again, I find myself questioning this reasoning; how many users would be browsing motherboards in a high street shop and decide on an impulse buy?

The mobo itself:
Take note of where the power connector is. Much better placement that the NF7 series. However, it does seem that the placement is different on the normal, non “Fatal1ty” AN8 boards, which is disappointing.
Its also reassuring to see an “Abit UK Genuine” sticker next to the DIMMs on the board, assuring us that its not a “grey import” that seem to be getting more common, and that Abit UK will offer support on it.
The HSF for the chipset is also a copper based one, but as far as I can tell, looks to be from the same manufacturer (whoever that is) of the NF7 one. Now it uses a proper 3 pin plug with a speed sensor, so lets just hope we can control this via the BIOS, or that its temperature controlled.






The OTES system on the back. Don’t worry, its not on all the time (unless you set it to be), you can set it to come on at certain temps from what ive read.
4USB onboard (additional 2 USB ports added with the included PCI bracket – see below), firewire, gigabit LAN and PS2 ports. It seems Abit has finally removed the parallel ports and serial from the board.



The Nforce 4 ultra. Nice to see a good layer of thermal goop on it. Again, much better than the NF7 received.



Under the mobo:
2 boxes of goodness

[Agent]

4 SATA cables are included, so you could use all the SATA ports on the motherboard out of the box. 1 SATA power cable (can power 2 SATA drives). The OTES RAM cooling system, manuals, drivers, Abit case badge (has a sort of hologram effect, looks pretty nice), and a signed, personal letter from Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel. Okay, I lied about the last part, its just a print with John’s face on it and some Abit marketing blurb. Still, it wouldn’t have hurt to have smiled Mr Wendel, you don’t have to keep a serious face on to prove your good
The OTES RAM system slots on top of the DIMM slots and provides 2 fans to circulate air around the RAM. How effective these will be I have doubts about. Firstly we had plain old RAM, which managed without any problem. Then we had heatspreaders attached to the RAM, which was considered by many to be a waste of time, as most memory chips don’t generate enough heat to warrant extra heat dissipation, for that reason, I cant see these fans being an aid to overclocking, more of a noise a nuisance, but ill wait to try it before making my judgment.



PCI USB and firewire bracket, 2 of each are house. The firewire has one larger and one smaller connection on it.



Finally, Abits “Audiomax” plugin. The observant ones may have noticed what looks like a backwards PCI-express slot at the top of the motherboard. This is Abits proprietary connection for its Audiomax peripheral. It has all the standard input and output’s for analogue audio, and digital in and out through optical SPDIF.

As soon as my other parts arrive, ill do some posts about the actual board when in use

[Rave]

You call it an AN7 a few times there mate. Apart from that, good work!

[Agent]

Doh, fixed

[BUFF]

People on the forums say that it needs a new BIOS (mind you so did all the others nF4 boards )
http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=379402
http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.p...&highlight=an8
http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=379650

[St3v3]

Nice board, would look cool in a windowed case too. Shame it lacks SLi

[nvening]

Is it worth the extra £30 compared with the dfi board? Or has most of that gone into the packaging? Whats so spacial about it? (im not slagging it off looks gooooood)

[speedy_s]

I would rather buy this than the dfi. It would perform better than the dfi out of the box i think and also it looks nice.

[weebroonieuk]

i dunno about that the reviews of the dfi are amazeing

and im an abit fan ! hoe this board turns out better tho .....

[skuzgib]

But how does it clock...?

[Michael]

On the carpet....

[Hans Voralberg]

On the carpet....

Worry 'bout ESD ?

[sjohnson_2006]

Anyone have any benchmarks straight out of the box? Im trying to decide weather to buy this Fatal1ty Board of the DFI NF4 ULTRA board or the DFI SLI board ( prolly not). Im not wanting to go SLI. You can use the second PCI-Express slot on the DFI Ultra mobo for a second video card (just not is sli mode)?

[weebroonieuk]

im an abit fan , but the dfi board is showing much better promise in the overclocking department ....

ive heard the dfi's dont fare so well in 24/7 stability......

[BUFF]

http://forum.abit-usa.com/showthread...5&pagenumber=1

[Agent]

Ill do an update tomrrow, given the time