Abit AN8 SLI Mainboard Review
Reviewed by: Sean ?Athildja? Kalinich
Manufacturer: Abit
Reviewed on: 26 September 2005
Product cost: $135.00 (£76.28 or 111.95?)
Product provided by: Abit USA
Introduction:
Overview:
Abit is company known for high performance and quality. Whether for their high-end video cards or their well-designed and highly over-clockable mainboards, if it has the Abit name on it you can expect superior performance. The AN8 SLI mainboard is part of the AN8 Series, which includes the AN8 Fatal1ty. Although the boards are essentially the same, the AN8 SLI has some very nice features that make it stand out in its own right. We here at planetAMD64 were able to put one of these boards on the rack and see how well it could take our torture.
Specs:
Processor:
- Supports AMD Socket 939 Athlon 64/64FX & Athlon 64 X2 dual-core Processors
- With 2GHz system bus using Hyper Transport? technology
- Supports AMD CPU Cool 'n' Quiet Technology
Chipset:
- NVIDIA NF4 SLI single chip
- NVIDIA Gigabit Ethernet with NVIDIA Firewall
- Supports NV SATA 3G RAID
Nvidia SLI Technology:
- Two PCI-Express X16 slots support NVIDIA Scalable Link Interface
- Increase bandwidth of the PCI Express bus providing 60x the bandwidth of PCI
Memory:
- Four 184-pin DIMM sockets
- Supports dual channel DDR400 non-ECC un-buffered memory
- Supports maximum memory capacity up to 4GB
Abit Engineered:
- ABIT µGuru? Technology
- ABIT Q-OTES? Technology
- ABIT AudioMAX? Technology
- ABIT CPU ThermalGuard? Technology
NV SATA RAID:
- Serial ATA 3Gbps data transfer rate
- Supports SATA RAID 0/1/0+1
NV GbE LAN:
- NVIDIA Gigabit Ethernet
- NVIDIA Secure Networking Engine
NV Firewall
- Native NVIDIA Firewall
IEEE1394:
- Support IEEE 1394 at 400 Mb/s transfer rate
Abit AudioMAX:
- High quality 7.1-channel Audio Card
- Optical S/P DIF Input/Output
- Supports auto jack sensing
Internal I/O Connectors:
- 2 x PCI Express X16, 2 x PCI Express X1, 2 x PCI slots, 1 x AudioMAX
- Floppy Port supports up to 2.88MB
- 2 x Ultra DMA 133/100/66/33 IDE Connectors
- 4 x SATA 3G Connectors
- 3 x USB headers, 1 x IEEE 1394 header
Back Panel I/O:
- ABIT Q-OTES
- 1 x PS/2 Keyboard, 1 x PS/2 mouse
- 1 x IEEE 1394
- 4 x USB, 1 x RJ-45 LAN Connector
Dimension:
- ATX form factor 305 x 245mm
Packaging and Accessories:
The Abit AN8 SLI comes in a very attractive green box, with a picture of a shadowed and dark mainboard used as the background, in the lower left of the box front is a large sticker with the model number and the features of the mainboard. In the upper left corner is the µGuru logo. To the right of both of these is the ?Is it Guru? label.
Inside the outer box, there are two smaller boxes that fit very neatly inside the larger box. Inside these two boxes are the accessories that come with the AN8 SLI.
Accessories:
- ABIT AudioMAX Card
- SLI Connector Bridge
- SLI Switch
- SATA cable x 4, ATA 100 IDE Cable x 1, FDD cable x 1, USB Bracket
- I/O shield x 1
- CD Title x 1, SATA Utility Disk x 1
- A5 standard User's Manual x 1, B5 multilingual Quick Installation Guide x 1
- Jumper Setting Label x 1
Board Layout: 4.25 out of 5
The layout on the AN8 seems very busy. When you first look at the AN8 SLI it seems as if there is not an empty spot on the board: from the Q-OTES heat-pipe to the numerous LEDs, jumpers, headers, and heatsinks. Indeed, I cannot imagine Abit packing more into the AN8 SLI and keeping the standard ATX size. Once the initial shock of the board is over and you have time to look at the layout you can tell that Abit has packed as much as they can into this board.
The first thing that draws your eyes is the Q-OTES Heat pipe, this is a copper tube that runs from the northbridge heatsink to a series of copper fins along the back side of the board just above the PS2 ports.
The Q-OTES heat-pipe travels in between the primary PCI-E slot and the CPU socket. Also in this area is what appears to be a left over, it is a fan header labeled NBFAN 1 (Northbridge Fan) I believe this is there for the Fatal1ty Board.
Just above the heat-pipe is the CPU socket. This is a standard 939-pin socket. To the right of the CPU socket are the RAM slots. The RAM slots on the AN8 SLI are setup to run Dual channel in either slots 1 and 2 or 3 and 4 (of course filling all the RAM slots would work also). One thing I noted with the position of the RAM slots, when using Corsair XMS Xpert series RAM (in slots 1 and 2) the LED modules come very close to the heatsink on the CPU. This set up would limit the size of heat sink usable on the AN8 SLI (although the RAM could be used in sockets 3 and 4)
To the left of the CPU Socket are the power regulators. Abit has placed heatsinks on top of them to help keep them cool. Another thing Abit has done is to place a small red LEDs above and below these heatsinks, these are not only visible through a windowed case but allow the Q-OTES radiator to be lit up with a red glow.
Above all of this are the 4 Pin Power header, the µGuru Chip and the Fan header for the CPU fan.
Moving down the board, below the Q-OTES heat-pipe we first find the PCI-E slots and the SLI switch. The AN8 SLI, as the name implies, supports Nvidia?s SLI technology. The AN8 SLI has 2 PCI x16 slots for use in SLI. Sandwiched in between the 2 PCI-E x16 slots are a single PCI-E x1 slot and the SLI switch. This is a small card that has to be removed, flipped over and reinserted to enable SLI. If you already have a video card installed this card can be complicated to access and to change.
Just below the second PCI-E x16 slot are the PCI slots. It is important to note that when using SLI the first PCI slot will be unusable, as any card placed in that slot will almost completely block the fan on the video card in that slot. The AN8 SLI has two IDE headers that are mounted on the right edge of the board at a 90-degree angle. This allows for easy access and better cable management.
Near the bottom right edge of the board we find the SATA ports. To the left are 3 USB headers for front panel USB ports. This added in with the 4 already on the board brings the total available USB ports to 10. The AN8 SLI also features jumpers to turn the power to these headers and the onboard USB ports off if desired. Also in this area is a set of Diagnostic LEDs. Abit has provided a method for diagnosing problems at boot up. By reading the simple two-digit code and referencing the manual you can quickly identify the source of just about any boot error.
On the bottom edge of the board below the PCI slots are the Floppy drive port and a 4-pin Molex power connector. The Molex power connector is used to provide additional power to the board when using SLI. These are in an inconvenient position, especially once the AN8 is mounted inside a case.
One other issue we found on the AN8 SLI was with the placement of the RAM slots. For this review we wanted to use Corsair XMS Xpert PC3200XL DDR RAM. This RAM has display modules on the top. If you are using water-cooling or the stock HSF that came with our Athlon64 Winchester Core 3200+ there is no problem. However, once we put the FX-55 on this system, the stock HSF that comes with it is large enough to require that we move the Corsair RAM to slots 3 and 4 to have enough room. Even standard OCZ DDR had very little clearance when using this HSF. Over all even though I found a few issues and the AN8 SLI seems a little chaotic, the layout is well done and provides enough space to reach most of the headers and jumper on the board.
Features and Bios: 4.15 out of 5
The features of the AN8 SLI are not easy to score. While all of them work extremely well in XP Professional, the majority, however, do not work in XP x64. None of the µGuru applications work in XP x64 they all fail with an error saying you must be logged in using an account with administrator level access, even if you are logged in as the administrator. The same can be said for the optical out on the AudioMax sound card, as this output does not work in XP x64 at all. Since PlanetAMD64 is a site geared towards 64-bit, I found that I could not give the AN8 SLI as good of a score for the features as I would like to. I will state again that ALL of the features work as they are supposed to in Windows XP Professional. I look forward to a 64-bit version of the µGuru suite and the AudioMax driver so that I will be able to use this board as well in XP x64 as I have in XP Professional.
Features:
Where to start, as mentioned earlier, the AN8 SLI seems to be packed with everything that Abit could throw into it.
µGuru: I guess this is a great place to start. Abit has provided a system monitoring, BIOS flashing, diagnostic, and overclocking utility.
µGuru includes many utilities of it?s own. With the installation of this application and driver you get OC Guru ? Auto Drive, FlashMenu, Abit EQ and Black Box.
We will cover each of those here.
OC Guru ? Auto Drive:
Abit OC Guru is a Windows based application that allow for instant and dynamic overclocking of the AN8 SLI (and other supported Abit mainboards). Using the drop down menu you can adjust almost every aspect of the AN8-SLI?s performance.
On this menu are the following options:
Turbo, Normal, and Quiet these three buttons are preset performance settings.
User 1-3, these buttons are for user defined performance settings. Default, this button returns the system to default settings. Below these buttons are Auto Drive, Configure Auto Drive, Power Cycle Control, SoftMenu, and Configure Present.
Auto Drive: this is an option to use one particular set of performance options for a selected application. For example, let?s say that you want your CPU overclocked for playing HalfLife2 you would set Auto Drive to automatically use that performance setting when you start HalfLife2. You can configure Auto Drive to work with just about any application and can select any of the performance options (Turbo, Normal, Quiet, User 1-3 or Default) to work with the selected application.
Configure Auto Drive:
This is where you would select the application you wanted to use with auto drive.
Power Cycle Control:
This shows the power cycle statistics for the mainboard. The following information can be found on this screen
AC Power On total time: this it the total time the system has been plugged into AC power whether on or off.
PC Up Time Total: this is the total hours the system powered on.
PC Up Time: this displays the time the system has been up during the current boot.
PC Power Cycles: this shows how many times the system has been powered on.
PC Reset Button Cycles: this shows how many times the system has been reset.
Also on this screen is an option to set a time for the system to power off. You can set this on a repeating schedule. (e.g. you could set the system to turn off every day at 12:45:30 pm).
Configure Present:
In this menu you can configure any one for the preset performance buttons.
Here you can configure the clock speed, voltage (CPU Memory, Northbridge, and HTT voltage)
Also configurable are the different fan settings (although the CPU fan is the only one applicable for the AN8 SLI) as well as the audio settings for the AudioMax sound card. This is a very nice feature, as you can preset a certain set of performance options for different games or applications and have them readily available with the click of your mouse.
Soft Menu:
Abit?s µGuru allows you to set functions in the BIOS using a Windows based utility called Soft Menu. In this menu anything you set is changed in the BIOS in real-time. The adjustments made to the system using this menu are displayed in real-time on the OC Gurus dashboard. Here you have almost all of the same options that would be available to you in the BIOS for overclocking your system. Abit has also built in a few safety features. In the event of a failed OC or an abnormal shut down or restart, OC guru will reset all of the current OC settings to default to allow you to check your settings.
Flash Menu:
This application allows you to update your BIOS while in Windows and has the following options for updates:
One Click Live Update, Update From File, Save Bios, and LiveUpdate Step by Step, each are self-explanatory.
Abit Black Box:
This utility acts like the block box on an aircraft and can record information pertinent to the system in the event of a crash. This information can be e-mailed to Abit to help determine the cause and provide you with a solution. You can manually enter the system information or you can allow black box to auto detect it.
Abit EQ:
Abit EQ is an application similar to SpeedFan or Motherboard Monitor. With this utility you can graphically see the different temperatures, fan speeds and voltages that the µGuru chip and the system monitors. You can also configure which items you want to monitor in the Abit EQ setup menu.
The µGuru suite of applications are very useful applications and provide a quick method for monitoring the system and changing the system setup for specific usage, unfortunately, Abit has not produced a 64 bit version yet. This means that for now the µGuru software is only usable in Windows XP Professional. This is something of a let down as Abit provides 64 bit drivers for all of the other devices on the AN8 SLI.
AudioMax:
Abit has chosen to move the system audio CODEC off of the main board for the AN8 SLI. By doing this, Abit can reduce the amount of electronic noise that the audio CODEC can pick up from surrounding parts. The output options on the AudioMax card are 7.1 analog, and Optical SPDIF out. For input there are Line-in and Mic-in options.
Q-OTES:
Although technically not a feature, the Q-OTES system does deserve mention. This system is Abit?s quiet method for cooling the MCP(Media and Communications Processor) on the AN8 SLI. The Q-OTES system starts with a copper based aluminum heatsink that is bolted down to ensure optimum contact with the MCP. This heatsink heats up the liquid in the heat pipe turning it to a gas, this rises to the copper fins attached to the top end of the pipe, these fins are then cooled by the air coming off of the CPU heatsink and fan. Although this cooling system is not as effective as I would have hoped (the air from the CPU is warm) it is still nice for quiet operation. The one issue that I can see with this cooling system is when a CPU fan is not used. If you are water-cooling your CPU there is no direct or indirect air movement and the only means to cool the fins is regular radiation. If you are using this system in a warm area or the back of the case receives little air movement the MCP on the AN8 SLI can get VERY hot. This can cause the system to shut off in order to protect the MCP from damage. This was very evident during the overclocking tests I ran.
Bios:
For the AN8 SLI BIOS Abit chose to use the Award BIOS layout, BIOS version 17 was used for all testing. BIOS version 17 has the following menus available when you enter the CMOS setup:
µGURU Utility
This is probably the most important part of the AN8 SLI?s BIOS for the enthusiast. Here is where 99% of the over clocking options are, as well as the monitoring options. These settings can be adjusted while in Windows using the OC Guru SoftMenu application.
Here you can adjust the following:
The CPU External Clock (up to 410MHz)
The Multiplier (from x4 to x25)
The PCI-E Clock (up to 145)
And the following Voltages
CPU Core (up to 1.75)
DDR Voltage (up to 3.40)
DDR VTT Voltage: (settings from 1.25 to 1.75 and DDR/2)
The nForce4 Voltage (up to 1.80)
The HT Voltage (up to 1.35)
You can also add to or subtract from the reference voltage settings for the CPU and memory with a range of plus or minus .60v. The Power Cycle menu provides information about system up time, and is the same information you can find in the OC Guru application. One interesting option to note it the OC on the Fly option, you can run this by pushing the F8 key. I attempted to find out how this works in the manual and there was no information on it. Hitting F8 merely brings up a dialog box that asks you if you want to OC on the fly. The options there are yes or no. Selecting yes showed no difference in the µGuru menu. Another sub-menu found in the µGuru menu is the AbitSEQ menu. Here is where you will find all of your monitoring options. On the AN8 SLI you can monitor just about every voltage, temperature and fan on the board. Abit does warn that all FanEQ monitoring should be disabled while in SLI mode.
Standard CMOS Features
As with most BIOS?s here is where you can set the date and time, and also see any non-RAID drives attached to your system.
Advanced BIOS Features
In this menu you will find the Boot priority sub-menus for removable devices, hard drives, and CD-ROMs, as well as the boot device priority for the system.
Advanced Chipset Features
In this menu you will find options for setting the HT frequency, the HT Width, and the DRAM configurations sub-menu. You can also set SSE and SSE2 instructions to disabled in this menu.
The DRAM configuration sub-menu is one of the most complete RAM menus I have seen, you can set each individual timing to either a manual adjusted setting or auto, this is a welcome feature, as many boards give you the group option of auto or manual.
Integrated Peripherals
In the Integrated Peripherals menu there are the following sub-menus and options:
The Onchip PCI Device and IDE/RAID Function sub-menus. USB Park Mode (enabled or disabled) USB TD Read, USB periodic Data Reads, USB Assyn Data Reads (Abit recommends leaving all of these at the default setting) and the Onboard FDC Controller (enabled or disabled). The Onchip PCI Device sub-menu contains options for the USB controllers (memory type, keyboard and mouse support) as well as for the onboard LAN. The IDE/RAID Function sub-menu contains the IDE Functions Setup sub-menu this has all of the options for IDE/SATA DMA and prefetch options, and the RAID Config sub-menu, which allows you to enable or disable the raid function for each IDE and SATA port.
Power Management Setup
In the Power Management menu there are the normal assortment of options, (ACPI Suspend Type, USB resume from S3, Wake-Up by options etc) the Cool and Quiet function can also be enabled or disabled in this menu.
PnP/PCI Configurations
In the PnP/PCI configuration menu is where you would find the option to change how the board resources are controlled, you can also set the PCI-E maximum payload here.
Overclocking options:
Overclocking options, Abit has packed a great deal of overclocking options into the AN8 SLI. The entire µGuru menu is one big overclocking option. The list does not stop there, by allowing you to individually define the mode of each type of RAM timing Abit gives you the ability to tweak the AN8 SLI on a very detailed level. My overclocking experience with the AN8 SLI was interesting. Marketed as an enthusiast and gamers mainboard the AN8 SLI comes with a host of tweaks and settings to get the most out of any CPU you place on it. Unfortunately I was not able to take advantage of many of them. The nForce4 voltage adjustment would often cause random shut downs, I fell this was caused by the Q-OTES system not being able to efficiently cool the MCP. I was able to OC the FX-55 to 2900 223x13 (1.6 vCore 2.8 vDimm HT voltage 1.25 memory at 1:1 with the following timings; CAS 3, TRAS 12.) in Windows XP Professional. At this setting the performance gain was not stable at all. By dropping the HTT to 221 I was able to run stably in both XP Professional and XP x64. The official OC for this board was 2873MHz. (221x13 vCore 1.6v vDIMM 2.8 CAS 3).
*All overclocking tests were run in SLI mode.
Windows XP Professional / Windows XP x64
Performance: 4.5 out of 5
Test system used:
AMD Athlon64 FX-55
Abit AN8 SLI Mainboard.
2x Leadtek PX7800GTX TDH 256MB DDR3 (tested in both single and SLi mode)
2x Hitachi 80GB SATAII 3GB drives (raid0)
1x Western Digital 80GG SATA 150 HDD (drive performance testing only)
1x Western Digital 40GB PATA HDD (drive performance testing only)
2x 512MB Corsair XMS Xpert CMXP512-3200XL DDR400 RAM. (TWINXP1024-3200XL)
Antec TruePower II 550 Watt PSU (SLI ready)
Microsoft Windows XP Professional W/SP2
Microsoft Windows XP x64 Edition
Drivers used:
Forceware 81.33(video) and 6.67(Chipset) for both XP Professional and XP x64 Edition
System Tests:
These tests represent the AN8 SLI?s overall performance.
Memory:
The memory bandwidth test on the AN8 SLI shows performance comparable with other socket 939 mainboards.
Windows XP Professional / Windows XP x64
Subsystem:
Audio:
The audio on the AN8 SLI is very good and the way that Abit has chose to move the sound codec off of the mainboard helps prevent performance bottlenecks.
We saw only a single frame difference between the audio being on and off in our testing.
Drives:
The AN8 SLI supports SATA II 3Gb transfers, as well as RAID 0,1 and 0+1.
Drive speeds were what we would expect from the drives used.
Windows XP Professional / Windows XP x64
Network bandwidth:
Having only a single Gigabit LAN, the AN8 SLI is something of an oddity in the enthusiast community, however this did not reduce the performance of the one built in. We had no issues using this adapter, even while transferring large files (1GB video file).
Application tests:
As with the system tests above the application tests allow us to see how well the AN8 SLI handles multi-tasking, number crunching and video encoding.
PCMark05: (standard tests only)
Divx Encoding:
Windows XP Professional / Windows XP x64
2:10:16 / 2:28:15
2:10:16 / 2:28:15
Super PI
Windows XP Professional / Windows XP x64
16M 13:24 / 13:20
32M 28:51 / 28:40
16M 13:24 / 13:20
32M 28:51 / 28:40
Gaming:
Gaming, now this is where the An8 SLI stands out, even in regular play the AN8 SLI is quick and responsive, the audio from the AudioMax sound card is impressive. We ran all of the gaming tests at 1600x1200@85Hz, with the maximum AA and AF settings enabled for each game. For HalfLife2 we were unable to run any of the time demo tests as after the recent Steam Update none of them would load correctly. We were able to run our FRAPS test with out issue. I did note that running our tests in Windows XP x64 Edition did not seem to have the performance increase I have witnessed from other mainboards.
Doom3
FarCry
HalfLife2
Costs: 4.25 out of 5
Price:
The AN8 SLI retails for about $135.00 (£76.28 or 111.95?) for the features and performance you get from the AN8 SLI this is a reasonable price and about what you would expect to pay for a board in this class.
Warranty:
The warranty on the AN8 SLI is 3 years from the date of manufacture. This is a little odd in the industry as most companies warrant the product from the date of sale. Abit?s eRMA service https://rma.abit-usa.com/ can process your RMA claim and determine if your mainboard is still under warranty by the serial number. If your board is out of warranty, there is still hope. Abit will still perform the repair if the following conditions are met:
* No physical damage
* You agree to pay $25 USD for current out of warranty charges
* Spare parts are still available for repair
Conclusion:
The AN8 SLI is a very nice board. Once you get around the chaotic layout and learn what order to perform your installation the AN8 SLI is actually very nice to work with. The BIOS provides more options for overclocking and monitoring that most enthusiast boards on the market with more RAM adjustments than most will ever use. Being able to set each timing setting to Auto or a tweaked setting is a huge plus in favor of this board. The µGuru suite of applications that Abit ships with the AN8 SLI are all very useful utilities, from the OC Guru to the Black Box each application adds more functionality to this mainboard. The only disappointment with the µGuru applications is the lack of a 64-Bit version. The audio on the AN8 SLI is also something that deserves mention, with very clean sound and the option to leave it out of the system if a 3rd party sound card is used, make it a very nice detail. For cooling of the MCP Abit chose to go with the Q-OTES system, as mentioned above this is a heat-pipe setup, although this setup is good for standard operation, we found that while overclocking the radiator on the Q-OTES would become quickly saturated and would actually increase the over all case temperatures. Overclocking of the AN8 SLI was a little difficult, there are many places where you have to go to change settings, in order to make the OC you are looking for work. The issue with the Q-OTES also complicated matters, as when I had the AN8 SLI overclocked it would often become very hot and shut the system down. If you are looking to overclock the AN8 SLI, I would recommend purchasing alternative cooling for the MCP.
In all I would highly recommend the AN8 SLI to someone who was looking for a very fast gaming system, as the AN8 SLI truly shines when it comes to gaming. Even in single card mode the games were very responsive, once we added the 2nd 7800GTX and ran SLI mode my experience with the AN8 SLI was even more impressive. So to wrap it all up, the AN8 SLI is an impressive board with some impressive performance. This is not to say it is not with out its issues, however most of them can be easily worked around. If you are looking for a good gaming board to run in Windows XP Professional I would take a serious look and the AN8 SLI.
Pros:
Fast
7.1 Surround Sound with Optical out
Highly configurable BIOS
µGuru Suite of applications
Quiet cooling Q-OTES
USB power can be shut off to individual USB headers
AudioMax ?off board? sound
Cons:
µGuru Apps do not work in XP x64
Q-OTES can become oversaturated and not cool efficiently
CPU socket too close to RAM slots
First PCI slot unusable when running SLI
Scores:
Board Layout: 4.25 out of 5
Features and BIOS: 4.15 out of 5
Performance: 4.50 out of 5
Price/warranty: 4.25 out of 5
Total: 17.15 out of 20
Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank Harry Yen at Abit for providing the AN8 SLI for this review
& yes i have checked the cards are the same & as for the make of PSU i got it from ebuyer so pass 