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Summary

AMD's release of the Socket 939 platform occured on the first of June this year, and since then, motherboard releases for that platform have been a little slow.  Motherboard manufacturers knew that the market would be slow for these products at first as the pick up on the processors themselves was slow.  However, it would appear that it was worth the wait for these motherboards, as Abit is going to show you here.

Though the feature set of the Abit board encompasses nearly everything you need, it is not breaking any records with included extras or number of features.  It does have Gigabit ethernet, Serial ATA RAID support, 6-channel audio with optical input and output as well as Firewire support.  But this motherboard's strength lies else where -- in the BIOS and overclocking options that it provides.  We'll get to more on that later. 

Here you can see the external connectors and what they provide for you at a glance. 

Of course we have a few benchmarks for you to look at, but as you would expect on the Athlon 64 platforms, with the memory controller integrated into the processor, even motherboards of different chipsets like we have here are going to perform very close to each other. 

There is very little difference in performance between the MSI K8N Neo2 based on the NVIDIA nForce3 Ultra chipset and the Abit AV8 based on the VIA K8T800 Pro chipset at stock speeds. 

As I mentioned above, the AV8 has much more to offer in terms of BIOS and overclocking.  As this is our basic review, meant for non-ethusiast readers, we won't get too much into that here.  If you would like to read about all that the Abit board has to offer in that arena, I encourage you to read our detailed review of this board by clicking this link or using the one below or even clicking "Expert" in the header for this article at the top of the page. 

Due to the outstanding overclocking ability that this motherboard gives users, it was awarded the PC Perspective Editor's Choice Award.  And while it does have most everything you might need for your personal PC, if you are more into the features (like more Serial ATA) than you are into the overclocking, then you may want to hold off on your purchasing decision for our other upcoming reviews. 

Click here for the Detailed Review