ABIT AN8 32X SLI Motherboard Review

Areas Of Interest

Once again, notice the “Silent OTES” technology that ABIT uses. This heatsink sits over the power area of the board, and becomes quite hot to the touch.

Here we see the NB Chipset of the board. Once again, as you can see the heatpipe actually runs under the chipset rather than through the heatsink that covers it. I am not sure why ABIT decided to so it this way, as more cooling never hurts. Since there is no way of increasing the chipset voltage (YET!), this should not really be a major concern.

One thing that has always been annoying to me is the locking mechanism of the AGP and now PCIe slots. They can be almost impossible to get at when you have your board in a case. On this board, ABIT uses a lock that is released by pushing on a lever that is on one side or the other of the card (depending on which slot isused). This was actully much easier to me, and a nice change by ABIT.

ABIT also like to include an LED diagnostic so that if you have a problem, you can read a code off of the LED and find out what might be causing it. THis is a very handy tool to have, especially if you are diagnosing a problem during booting up.

Speaking of lights, one last thing that might be interesting to note is ABIT’s use of backlighting on this board. Once installed in your case and fired up, thee is a nice red glow that comes from behind the board. This will be a certain attraction to those that like to showcase their rigs with all kinds of lighting. Take a look: