ABIT AN8 32X SLI Motherboard Review

ABIT’s 32 Lane PCI Express Solution: AN8 32X

When you talk about great motherboards of the past, you can hardly name any board before the name ABIT will come up. Some of my most exciting adventures in overclocking were done on ABIT boards. ABIT was a name that I swore by with my Intel Pentium 4 Northwood CPUs. Those were fun days… the Max line of boards were just awesome, and there was hardly and Intel overclocker or enthusiest that did not have one. If I remember correctly, those were also some of the first boards that gave us advanced vdimm options without having to do any mods to the boards. That was some good stuff! Fast forward a number of years now, and as we look at ABIT’s recent history, they have struggled, and even at one point many rumored that they were going to go under. It was a sad day when I first heard that rumor, but I am glad to report that it was just that… a rumor! ABIT is still going strong, and their recent merger with Universal Scientific Industrial Co. Ltd. has put them in a much stronger financial position. Now, with a new name, Universal ABIT Co., Ltd., ABIT hopes to once again compete for the top dog of motherboard manufacturers in the enthusiest community.

We are pleased to be able to look at the first ABIT board for review that Legit has done for quite awhile. On the bench in this review in the ABIT AN8 32X motherboard.

Take a look at the specs:

Processor
– Supports Socket 939 Athlon64/ 64FX/ 64X2 Processor
– 2GHz system bus using Hyper Transport? Technology
– Supports AMD CPU Cool ‘n’ Quiet Technology

Chipset
– NVIDIA NF4 SLI X16 / NF4 SLI Chipset

Memory
– Four 184-pin DIMM sockets
– Supports Dual channel DDR 400 ECC/non-ECC un-buffered memory
– Supports maximum memory capacity up to 8GB

NVIDIA SLI Technology
– Two PCI-Express X16 slots support NVIDIA Scalable Link Interface
– Two full-bandwidth 16-lane PCI Express

NV SATAII 3Gb/s RAID
– Supports 4 ports SATAII 3Gb/s RAID 0/1/0+1/5
– Supports SATA AHCI, providing native command queuing & native hot plug

2nd SATA RAID
– Serial ATA 3Gbps by Sil 3132 PCIE controller
– Supports SATA RAID 0/1 NCQ

Audio
– On board 7.1 CH Audio CODEC (ALC850)
– Supports auto jack sensing and optical S/PDIF In/Out

NV GbE
– NVIDIA Gigabit Ethernet with NV Firewall ActiveArmor

IEEE1394
– Supports IEEE1394a

Internal I/O Connectors
– 2 x PCI Express x16 (two full-bandwidth 16-lane PCI Express)
– 2 x PCI Express x1, 2 x PCI slots
– 1 x Floppy port supports up to 2.88MB
– 6 x SATA connectors
– 2 x Ultra DMA 133/100/66/33 connectors
– 3 x USB 2.0 headers, 1 x IEEE 1394 header
– 1 x Guru Link?

Back Panel I/O
– 1 x PS/2 Keyboard, 1 x PS/2 Mouse
– 4 x USB ports, 1 x RJ-45 LAN port, 1 x IEEE 1394
– 1 x S/P DIF In, 1 x S/P DIF Out