January 19, 2005 - Fremont, CA. ABIT Fatal1ty AA8 is blazing a path through the hardware review world and leaving a trail of awards, recommendations and endorsements. The latest comes from respectable PC Perspective website. Here are the highlights:
 "The idea behind this new brand was to allow ABIT and the Fatal1ty group to develop new ideas in gaming hardware and to have the ability to market them strongly. Motherboard manufacturers have, in recent years, struggled to make themselves stand out from their competitors and ABIT had an uphill battle to develop some new innovations to put on their "Fatal1ty" motherboards that would indeed live up to the expectations that they set and built up.
The most noticeable feature on the Fatal1ty AA8XE motherboard is the new OTES cooling system that ABIT developed for the MOSFETs around the processor socket. The pairs of MOSFETs are covered by ice-blue colored heatsinks and then shrouded by a plastic casing that is used to funnel air out of the system. There are two fans on the external connectors side of the motherboard that pull warm air out through the OTES system.
 ABIT has provided a diagnostic LED and color coded ATX front panel switches. For the hardcore enthusiast, ABIT also included on-board power and reset switches so you don't have to install the board in a case to get it working.
A surprising feature that ABIT included in the packaging is an addition to the OTES cooling system that is made for cooling memory modules. The image shows the RAMFlow device installed (with no memory installed, obviously). It uses a simple mechanism of springs that close tightly around the memory module retention clips to stay in place.
The ABIT Fatal1ty AA8XE motherboard offers a very wide array of options and settings for overclocking and system tweaking. Everything from the detailed FSB settings to the different voltage options that ABIT has included, that no one else does, just screams for you to poke and prod at this board until you get it to the absolute highest performing level you can. And thanks to the ABIT OC Guru menus and the ability to save profiles, PC Perspective's overclocking experience on the ABIT board was better than any other board on the market provided.
The default 2.8 GHz (200 Mhz FSB) Intel 520 processor was able to overclock to a 270 Mhz bus speed resulting in a frequency of 3.78 Ghz. This is really a damn good overclock of nearly a gigahertz on an inexpensive processor using only modest liquid cooling. Most likely using air-cooling you would get similar results that we saw in PC Perspective's initial AA8 motherboard review.
Overall the ABIT Fatal1ty AA8XE motherboard more than impressed me. From the packaging to the performance and everything in between. ABIT really has done all it can to get the best performing Intel platform motherboard you can buy. It is able to out pace the Intel reference board at the same memory timings and definitely over shadows any other motherboard BIOS I have seen when it comes to pure capacity to tweak and modify the system settings. If only Intel's processors weren't locked by default, we might be able to see where this board can really go.
For the full review, go to: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=105
For more information on the Fatal1ty AA8XE motherboard, go here:
http://www.abit.com.tw/upload/english/fatal1ty-aa8xe/index-en.htm | 
