AM2 MBO Round-up: Part IV - Abit Fatal1ty AN9 32X
Author: Josip Brombauer
Date: 11 Dec 2006

Abit Fatal1ty AN9 32X

The Fatal1ty brand is already well known in the PC gaming arena, so we knew right from the start what to expect from this board. Even though the AN9 32X is an excellent product, having reviewed the ASUS Crosshair prior to this board, we were left just a tiny bit disappointed with Fatal1ty?s overall feature set. Admittedly, the Crosshair is newer, but still we feel Abit should?ve continued to advance its premium board and not wait for the competition to catch up and even take the lead. First of all, there are no power or reset switches on the board itself, something we?ve gotten quite used to on high-end enthusiast motherboards. There is a LED display present, though it somewhat pales in comparison to Crosshair?s LCD display. The I/O panel area of the Fatal1ty is equally void of connectors as Crosshair?s is, but this time it is because of two fans positioned to cool down the chipset heatsink with air from outside of the case. It?s a part of the OTES GT cooling design. Here, too, the SoundMAX audio logic is placed onto a separate daughter card to eliminate interference and provide for a cleaner sound experience.
As far as the connectors and slots are concerned, we have the usual two x16 PCI Express slots for SLI, two more PCI Express x1 and another one exclusively placed for the SoundMAX card, and also one PCI slot. Six SATA, two IDE and 4+6 USB connectors are standard for the nForce 590 SLI chipset, so are the two gigabit LAN ports. The I/O panel also features two PS/2 ports.
Not to be too hard on Abit, we have to say that this motherboard has a few really, really neat and eye-candy features ? a red PCB, red LEDs that are on even when the motherboard is on standby, a red BIOS background, the μGuru hardware monitoring and oveclocking chip - these are all those little things that make a small difference. We suspect there should be some BIOS upgrades on the way, since this one doesn't really work with 4-4-4-12, no matter if you use 1T or 2T memory setting. So, we had to resort to testing with 4-5-5-15@2T, which didn't do any favors to the overall performance...