nForce4 Ultra Roundup: Charting the Mainstream
by Wesley Fink on July 5, 2005 10:28 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Abit Fatal1ty AN8: Features and Layout
| Specification | Abit Fatal1ty AN8 |
| CPU Interface | Socket 939 Athlon 64 |
| Chipset | nForce4 Ultra (single chip) |
| BUS Speeds | 200MHz to 410MHz (in 1MHz increments) |
| PCI/AGP Speeds | Asynchronous (Fixed) |
| PCI Express | 100MHz to 145MHz in 1MHz increments |
| Core Voltage | Auto, 1.5V to 1.85V in 0.025V increments (with 4000+ | CPU Ref Voltage | +10mv to +60mv, -10mv to -60mv in 10mv increments |
| DRAM Voltage | Auto, 2.5V to 2.8V in 0.05V increments |
| DDR Ref Voltage | +10mv to +70mv, -10mv to -50mv in 10mv increments |
| Chipset Voltage | 1.5V to 1.8V in 0.05V increments |
| Hyper Transport Ratios | Auto, 1X to 5X in 1X increments |
| LDT Bus Transfer | 16/16, 16/8, 8/16, 8/8 |
| LDT Voltage | 1.25V to 1.4V in 0.05V increments |
| PCI Synchronization | Auto, To CPU, 33.33MHz |
| CPU Ratios | Auto, 4x to 20x in 0.5x increments |
| DRAM Speeds | Auto, DDR200, DDR266, DDR333, DDR400 (Plus DDR433, 466, 500 with Rev. E Processor) |
| Memory Command Rate | Auto, 1T, 2T |
| Memory Slots | Four 184-pin DDR Dual-Channel Slots Unbuffered ECC or non-ECC Memory to 4GB Total |
| Expansion Slots | 1 x16 PCIe Slots 2 x1 PCIe 3 PCI Slots |
| Onboard SATA | 4-Drive SATA 2 by nF4 |
| Onboard IDE | Two Standard NVIDIA ATA133/100/66 (4 drives) |
| SATA/IDE RAID | 4-Drive SATA 2 PLUS 4-Drive IDE (8 total) Can be combined in RAID 0, 1 |
| Onboard USB 2.0/IEEE-1394 | 10 USB 2.0 ports supported nF4 2 1394A FireWire ports by TI TSB43AB22A |
| Onboard LAN | PCIe Gigabit Ethernet by Vitesse VSC8201RX PHY |
| Onboard Audio | Audiomax 7.1 Audio Card with Realtek ALC850 8-Channel codec with 6 UAJ audio jacks, CD-in, front audio, and optical SPDIF |
| Other Features | AMD Dual-Core (X2) Support with 1.5 BIOS |
| BIOS | Award 1.5 (6/21/05) |
The Abit Fatal1ty AN8 is a member of the Fatal1ty series of motherboards aimed at gamers. Abit claims that everything about the Fatal1ty boards is beefed up for utmost stability in gaming situations. This "beefing-up" includes a special dual-fan OTES cooling system for the power transistors, and a dual-fan cooling device for RAM that Abit calls OTES RAMflow. These are two of the biggest heat-generating areas in modern motherboards and the Abit approach is noteworthy. With this attention to features that matter a great deal to the Enthusiast, we have great expectations of the overclocking abilities of the Abit Fatal1ty. Abit also has announced an SLI version of the Fatal1ty AN8, which adds dual-video NVIDIA SLI capabilities to the AN8 feature set.
The other side of the "beefed-up" Abit is the cost, as the Fatal1ty AN8 is by far the most expensive nForce4 Ultra motherboard in this roundup with a street price of about $185. With that kind of price, buyers will certainly expect the Fatal1ty AN8 to be head and shoulders above the other boards in the roundup. If this is too rich for your blood, then Abit also sells the more basic AN8 board for about $100 street price.
Click image to enlarge.
The 24-pin ATX and 4-pin 12V connectors are at the board edges, where they work best. It is also a pleasure to see Abit place the 4 SATA connectors and PCIe slot where they will not interfere with each other. Board makers seem to be giving more thought to IDE placement lately, but SATA connectors are increasingly a mess to work with in many motherboards. Top video cards are big, and SATA connectors behind a PCIe slot can make a decent board a nightmare if you're mounting SATA devices. Abit, fortunately, gave some thought to SATA placement.
While it's not pictured, the included "Audio Max" dedicated sound card fits in the first slot - just above the 2 PCIe x1 slots. This is a good location, which clusters sound connectors near the rear panel. While the Audio Max is powered by the very common Realtek ALC850 codec, isolating the sound hardware, like we have seen DFI do on similar dedicated sound cards, should pay off in lower noise and reduced CPU overhead for the audio hardware.
Abit boards usually have quite a few fan connectors, and this would certainly be expected on a board geared to gamers, who may have many devices to cool. Unfortunately, there are just 3 fan headers on board; after the North Bridge and CPU, there is just the System Fan header. That means that if you have a Power Supply with a fan-monitoring plug, there are no spares on the Abit. A "gamers" board really needs a few more fan headers.
The storage area is basic nForce4, which is pretty good by itself, but there are no additional RAID controllers, which you might expect on a $185 board.
The BIOS options are typically Abit, meaning that they are very good. There's just about any BIOS adjustment that you might want. One particular disappointment are the memory voltage controls, which only extend to 2.8V. Abit has fixed this option in other versions of the AN8 - the Ultra and SLI extend to 3.55V for super high-voltage 2-2-2 memory like OCZ VX and Mushkin Redline. For that reason, the other Abit AN8 boards are a better choice for the Athlon 64 enthusiast than this early AN8 Fatal1ty. The Abit AN8 Fatal1ty is one of the two boards in this roundup that supports the additional 433, 466, and 500 memory speed options on an AMD Rev. E processor.
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Zebo - Wednesday, July 6, 2005 - link
Does ECS build EPOX's boards? just curious because they look pretty cheap like ECS IMO..Heidfirst - Wednesday, July 6, 2005 - link
"[b]#19 and Others - I'm sure you must have noticed that some web sites have never posted a negative review of an Abit board. Also water cooling and asynchronous ram is hardly comparable to our air-cooled tests.The first thing I did was check other reviewers and users of the Abit board. The great majority are running into problems at about 250 FSB - although a few are getting better performance. Abit has had so many complaints about the OC performance of this board that I would fully expect a hardware revision on the horizon.[/b]"
Well the Fatality AN8 SLi, AN8 SLi, AN8 Ultra, AN8 V2.0 & AN8-V are effectively the new revision as I pointed out. Why buy a Fatality AN8 when the AN8 Ultra has better Vcore, better sound & is cheaper?
& people have had HTT395 & DDR660 out of them on air ...
Heidfirst - Wednesday, July 6, 2005 - link
Wesley Fink - Wednesday, July 6, 2005 - link
#19 and Others - I'm sure you must have noticed that some web sites have never posted a negative review of an Abit board. Also water cooling and asynchronous ram is hardly comparable to our air-cooled tests.The first thing I did was check other reviewers and users of the Abit board. The great majority are running into problems at about 250 FSB - although a few are getting better performance. Abit has had so many complaints about the OC performance of this board that I would fully expect a hardware revision on the horizon.
Abit set the expectation that the AN8 Fatal1ty was the best of the best with a price tag to match. It's an interesting board with many interesting features, but it's performance as it now stands is nowhere near the best.
TheGlassman - Wednesday, July 6, 2005 - link
I think that a round up such as this would serve the readers better if three types of memory were used and various dividers used.My Chaintech VnF4 is running at 256x11 quite happilly, so I know it will run well over 245 with a divider with my memory, and I'm sure most of the other boards as well. And yes, many people run it over 300 HTT with lower multi cpu's.
This is not to say that 1:1 testing is not important, but since this is a round up, the various needs and budgets of your readers should be taken into account.
Seeing bios's used that are dated during the testing, with a known single memory may if repeated cause readers to think that Anandtech doesn't deserve it's well earned reputation as a fair and complete tester of all things important to PC ethusiasts.
Using memories with 3 different types of chips and using relevant dividers to find maximum HTT's and cpu speeds with each, while being more work, I think will be worth while to your readers, especially in a round up where boards are compared directly to each other.
This current round up implies that most nF4 boards are not capable of high HTT's, but the truth is you have only shown that most do not run one type of memory at very high speeds. You have not exposed the limits of the boards, nor do we know if the situation is the same with any of the other commonly used memories.
bldckstark - Wednesday, July 6, 2005 - link
Xpose-Not too early. I don't have my board yet. I have been waiting on X2. Using your same logic that means that nobody has a board yet right? I mean, since I am the only person I know that is going to build a A64 system soon then I should assume that nobody has one.
Geez
xpose - Wednesday, July 6, 2005 - link
This Editor's Recommendation for best motherboard is at least 3 months too late. We already have had all of our boards.Also, to say that the VN4F Ultra is a bad overclocking board is completely wrong. I have a 3000+ CPU running at 2.67gz now. That is about 49% OC and damn good reguardless of the MB.
Son of a N00b - Wednesday, July 6, 2005 - link
great article! you can clearly see the hours of hard work you put into it. Great Job, I enjoyed it and it was jam packed with info.one quuestion though where was the gugabyte board ultra board?? sure you may have reviewed it in the SLI roundup, but then did you not do the same with DFI? Plus you had great results with the reference gigabyte board, but not the revision 1 board...i'd like to see how ir fairs now...maybe i missed something why you reviewed the DFI board again becuase I am not familiar witha ll their variations and naming scheme, but to me it looked the same...why review that one and not the others? sure its great to rehash what a great board the DFi one is but....
just wondering as I have always had great success with gigabyte boards...but i probably missed something even thought i read it back to front, sorry if i did as i know that you would never do something without a good reason behind it...
anyway thanks, keep the awesome articles rolling...
smn198 - Wednesday, July 6, 2005 - link
Hi Wesley, thanks for the clarification on the HTT. do you know if it would have any more of an impact when dual core is brought into the equation?Thanks again. Good article BTW!
BigandSlimey - Wednesday, July 6, 2005 - link
#18 I really like that idea, would probably be a headache to make it and keep it updated though.