Abit Fatal1ty AN8 Grange-over-Sands

In the egocentric world of gaming, what could possibly be better than the player who is unstoppable? If you're the best you demand respect, albeit grudgingly, from other gamers, and Mr Fatal1ty Wendel is just that kind of gamer. He isn't the first, though, as we remember a nameless Tekken master taking on all comers during an episode of 'GamesMaster', beating well over 100 different players and only losing to a random button basher. Both Mr Wendel and the anonymous Tekken guru are highly skilled in their field, but unfortunately for the Tekken guru, he ruled the wrong game at the wrong time. Not so for the lucratively sponsored Fatal1ty, whose name and face is plastered all over a range of Abit motherboards.

But what does the best gamer in the world (arguably) know about motherboard design? Well, he's been heard to talk in a general manner about the merits of overclocking and the need for high frame rates. But does that mean he can actually bring anything more useful to the field of motherboard design than your average CPC reader? Looking at the specs of the latest Abit board, we're not convinced.

The nForce4 Ultra chipset is an obvious and excellent choice for online gamers, firstly because of its superb 3D performance, and secondly because it has Nvidia ActiveArmor and Gigabit LAN, although you'll be hard-pressed to find a use for a full Gigabit connection on most LANs. These features, though, are standard to the nForce4 Ultra chipset, so any nForce4 Ultra board, even those (gasp) not endorsed by Wendel will play Doom 3 at lightning speeds, given the correct CPU and graphics card.

Fortunately for Wendel's agent (and his percentage), the Fatal1ty A8N has some very interesting specs. More importantly, these aren't just checkbox features. Of most use to gamers will be the ten USB 2 ports, four of which are on the rear panel, with the other six available through PCI backplate extensions. In addition to this, you get four S-ATA RAID ports, which are controlled by the Southbridge. There's also a FireWire port on the back of the board and a header for attaching a port to the front panel of your case, plus two EIDE ports. All of these are useful features on a gamer's motherboard. The Realtek ALC658 sound chip is mounted on a daughterboard that plugs into a proprietary slot, but it provides only basic 5.1 audio.

For this special Fatal1ty board Abit has also added a number of other extras. As with the superb AA8XE, fans and lights make a major appearance. But, once again, the extra features are a mixed bag. Like the best Abit motherboards of recent years, such as the IC7 Max 3, and the aforementioned AA8XE, the Fatal1ty AN8 has an OTES (Outside Thermal Exhaust System) to keep the VRMs cool. This worked exceptionally well on both the IC7 Max 3 and AA8XE boards, because keeping the VRMs cool helps to maintain stable voltages. If you can keep the CPU voltages stable, you should be able to achieve high overclocks. Interestingly, the OTES fans on the Fatal1ty AN8 aren't on constantly, as they respond dynamically to the temperature of the VRMs. This is a real step forward, because the fans on earlier OTES motherboards ran at full speed, and two 40mm fans make a rather unpleasant noise. It's worth noting that the cowling over the OTES may make it difficult to fit large CPU HSFs, though.

Absurdly, given the thermal control on the OTES fans, the fans on the RAMFlow memory cooler are always on. They're certainly effective at cooling high-performance memory modules, such as the Corsair XMS 4400C25 DIMMs we used for testing, but this didn't appear to increase their overclocking potential. As we already know, heatspreaders make no difference, and although lower temperatures may extend the life of your components, we'd be tempted to simply ditch the RAMFlow and make the PC a little bit quieter.

Further gamer-baiting madness comes in the form of a multitude of on-board red LEDs. We counted seven on the underside of the board, two on the top in the VRM OTES cowling, and two useful status indicators. As well as the indicators, you get a status readout, which can be handy in the event of an error and will give you an indication of why your PC is failing to POST. This is useful when you're building a PC or adding new components, because if the board freezes at boot, you'll know which component has failed.

PERFORMANCE

Failure is a dirty word and, unfortunately, the extra OTES cooling is a failure on this motherboard. Although it's designed to be heavily overclocked, it's let down by the nForce4 Ultra chipset. Unlike the earlier OTES motherboards, our sample wouldn't overclock by much. In fact, when the smoke cleared we only squeezed an extra 20MHz out of the effective FSB, pushing it from the default 200MHz to 220MHz. This is the same increase as that of the Shuttle nForce4 Ultra-based SN25P. Considering that this is a comparison between a little SFF and a mighty Fatal1ty AN8, it really makes the Fatal1ty AN8 look like a damp squib as far as overclocking is concerned. It's also slightly slower than the Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI board we tested last month.

Overclocking aside, the Fatal1ty AN8 performed well at standard clock speeds in both our Media Benchmarks and game tests. It achieved a score of 1.17 in our TMPGEnc video encoding test, and 1.44 in the Paint Shop Pro image editing test. More importantly for gamers, the board achieved an excellent average frame rate of 69.6fps in Doom 3 at 1,280 x 1,024 with 2x AA and 2x AF. However, the SN25P performed almost identically, averaging 70.3fps in Doom 3.

CONCLUSION

If you want decent performance from your Socket 939 Athlon 64 then the Fatal1ty AN8 is a reasonable choice. But if you're hoping that the OTES and RAMFlow will aid overclocking then you'll be disappointed.

At just under £130, it's also pretty expensive, given that you could buy an nForce4 SLI board, such as the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe, for £20 less, which provides much more potential for upgrading.

Author: Josh Blodwell

Abit Fatal1ty AN8