Abit Fatal1ty AN8

A stylish board with overclocking potential

What do you get when you mix a motherboard manufacturer known for tweakable boards and champion gamer Fatal1ty? In Abit's case, you get the Fatal1ty AN8.

Based around AMD's Socket 939 and Nvidia's Nforce4 Ultra chipset, the Fatal1ty AN8 has high-end Abit goodies such as OTES (outside thermal exhaust system) cooling, Uguru Bios and enough LEDs to sate most modders. With a red PCB that has a mixture of red and black slots, the board really stands out.

At first glance, the board seems a little light on features, but the chipset has much of what you need. PCI Express slots come in the form of a x16 graphics slot and two x1 slots and there are three standard PCI slots.

The chipset has good options for storage. Two ATA133 and four Serial ATA (Sata) ports can be combined into Raid arrays, and the Sata ports are Sata II, meaning the board supports NCQ (native command queuing) and Western Digital's TCQ (tagged command queuing) for better hard drive performance.

Unlike high-end motherboards that have dual Gigabit Ethernet capability and Wifi, the Fatal1ty AN8 has a single integrated Gigabit Ethernet controller.

The chipset cooler is active, but it's a low-profile unit and sits out of the way between the CPU socket and the PCI Express slot. Two fans on the rear panel mean there's no room for audio, serial or parallel ports, although Abit supplies an Audiomax riser card.