Introduction

The initial Fatal1ty branded motherboard, the Fatal1ty AA8XE, came under a lot of fire from both users and the media for inaccurately portraying itself as the "fastest gaming motherboard."  After all, how could an Intel platform lay claim to a title that is so obviously in the hand of AMD's Athlon 64 processors?  While the Fatal1ty AA8XE motherboard was a very good quality board with a good feature set and BIOS, the real market for gaming systems lies in the hands of the enthusiast market with AMD processors.  Thus, it was little surprise that even before I received the AA8XE board, I began to hear the rumblings of the Fatal1ty AN8. 

Let's take a quick look at the feature list before moving on to our full review.

Specifications (from Abit website)

Processor - AMD Athlon 64/64FX 939-pin K8 CPU - 2GHz system bus using Hyper Transport Technology - AMD CPU Cool ‘n�Quiet Technology Memory - Four 184-pin DIMM sockets - Support 4 DIMM Dual DDR 400/333/266 non-ECC memory - Support 4 DIMM up to 4GB Max. Chipset - NVIDIA NF4 Ultra single chip - Integrated NV Gigabit Ethernet and NV Firewall NV SATA RAID - Supports SATA 3Gbps data transfer rate - SATA RAID 0/1/0+1 JBOD NV GbE LAN - NVIDIA Gigabit Ethernet via NF4 Ultra NV Firewall - Native NVIDIA Firewall via NF4 Ultra IEEE1394 - Support IEEE 1394 at 400/200/100 Mb/s transfer rate Audio - 5.1-channel Audio Card - Optical S/P DIF In/Out Internal I/O Connectors - 1 PCI-E X16 slot, 2 PCI-Express X1 slots - 3 PCI slots, 1 x ABIT Audio slot - 1x Floppy Port supports up to 2.88MB - 2 x Ultra DMA 33/66/100/133 Connectors - 4 x SATA 3G Connectors - 3 x USB headers, 1 x IEEE1394 header Back Panel I/O - 1 x IEEE1394 Connector - 1 x PS/2 Keyboard, 1 x PS/2 mouse - 4 x USB+ 1 x RJ-45 LAN Connector Dimension - ATX form factor 305 * 245mm Package - 1 x Audio Card - 1 x Back panel I/O shield - 4 x SATA cables - 1 x ATA 133 IDE Cable, 1 x FDD cable - 1 x USB2.0 + IEEE1394 cable - 1 x A5 standard User’s Manual - 1 x A5 uGuru User’s Manual - 1 x B5 multilingual Quick Installation Guide - 1 x CD title, 1 x SATA Driver Disk - 1 x ABIT Case Badge, 1 x Jumper Setting Label