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Abit Fatal1ty AN8

JC 17.03.2005 - 08:57 2134 2
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JC

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Review @ The Tech Report
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With the nForce4 Ultra's impressive feature set, generally competitive performance, and extensive BIOS-level tweaking, monitoring, and overclocking options, the Fatal1ty AN8 proves to be an excellent Athlon 64 motherboard. But it's not a cheap one. With a street price hovering around $187, the board is $40-50 more expensive than enthusiast-oriented nForce4 Ultras like DFI's LANParty UT NF4 Ultra-D. That's quite a price premium to pay considering the Fatal1ty board's relatively thin assortment of extras. At that price, we'd expect a better bundle, a second networking option, another PCI-E x16 slot, or maybe even an nForce4 SLI rather than Ultra chipset.

It's not like Abit doesn't have anything it could bundle with the board, either. The company's uGuru Clock seems like a perfect companion for the Fatal1ty AN8, and we suspect that most users would gladly trade the Fatal1ty board's extra LEDs and RAMFlow cooler for it.

If the Fatal1ty AN8 has an ace in the hole, it's the board's fantastic BIOS and uGuru hardware monitoring. Those features aren't exclusive to the Fatal1ty board, though. The less-expensive AN8 has the same uGuru and BIOS options, but you lose out on RAMFlow, the Fatal1ty color scheme, and red LEDs. You also have have to settle for the nForce4 rather than nForce4 Ultra chipset. For those who have no need for the Ultra's SATA-II transfer rates or ActiveArmor acceleration, the plain-Jane AN8 may be a better option.

JC

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Review @ ExtremeTech
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If you don't consider overclocking a critical factor, this is one of the best Athlon 64 boards we've tested. It's packed with good features, and extremely easy to work with. The benchmarks are the highest we've seen for an Athlon 64 FX-55. Will similar new chipset motherboards for AMD's CPUs deliver similar performance? We'll be taking a look at quite a few of them over the coming weeks, and it will be interesting to see how they stack up. Compared with the last-generation chipsets, it's a real winner.

That said, we were extremely disappointed to find that we could hardly overclock our FX-55 chip at all. It's hard to know exactly where to place the blame for this—on the CPU, its cooling, or the motherboard. Still, for a motherboard that emphasizes overclocking, our lack of success is definitely bad news. The features and utilities for juicing up your CPU are fantastic, so this could be a great board for those users. We just didn't get there in our tests. At this price, this is obviously not a board for everyday users. If you're a hard-core enthusiast, we have no problem recommending it. The benchmark scores are fantastic, and the nForce 4 Ultra chipset delivers fantastic features. The slot layout is highly unusual and could be bad or good depending on what you plan to install, so plan accordingly.
Bearbeitet von JC am 18.03.2005, 13:34 (dun :D)

Silvasurfer

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Zitat von JC
Zitat von dosensteck
pervers.

aber andere länder sind auch nicht besser - todesstrafe is leider noch gang und gebe. diese hier war halt sehr brutal :(

bitte bitte des Advertisement rauskopieren, des stört den text den du c&p ;)
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