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