|  February 15, 2005 Fremont, CA Built for Gamers, by Gamers, ABIT's motherboards deliver the kind of performance gamers need to stay a cut above the competition. Jason Cross, the editors at ExtremeTech took ABIT Fatal1ty AA8XE for a spin, and after putting the board through some tough tests, had no problems recommending the board, giving it a 9 out of 10 score!
 "If you follow the professional gaming scene, you probably recognize the name Fatal1ty. Jonathan Wendel, who goes by that handle, is one of the top professional gamers in the world. Wendel has now partnered with ABIT to produce Fatal1ty motherboards, geared for high-end gaming, overclocking, and extreme PC enthusiasts. The first such board is the AA8XE, a Pentium 4 motherboard based on Intel's 925XE chipset. This isn't just another motherboard with a pro gamer's brand stamped on it, though. Wendel worked with ABIT engineers to produce a customized product that meets his needs—and the needs of those who push their PCs to extreme limits.
In everything from the board's layout to its marketing to its BIOS screen, ABIT is clearly targeting this component at high-end enthusiasts interested in taking expensive hardware and pushing it to the limit. And in our view, it succeeds admirably.
 The BIOS setup makes it clear that this board is for tweakers and overclockers. The first menu item on the Fatal1ty AA8XE is ABIT's "µGuru Utility." This is the menu that lets you change CPU bus speed and multiplier, adjust DRAM frequency ratio, change PCI and PCIe clocks, and tweak voltages. There's also a Windows µGuru Utility application included with the board that lets you monitor fan speeds and tweak all the bus speeds, multipliers, and voltages you care to. It's pretty simple to use and includes a couple of preset configurations. The "Turbo" option in this utility pushed the front-side bus of our processor from 200MHz (800MHz effective) to 220MHz (880MHz effective). But with a bit of hand tweaking, we were able to achieve stable performance at 230MHz (920MHz effective). With stock cooling, that's quite a feat.
The Fatal1ty AA8XE is based on the 925XE chipset, something we've certainly covered here before. It supports the 1066MHz front-side bus of Pentium 4 Extreme Edition CPUs, but we opted for a late-model 3.4GHz Prescott-based Pentium 4, because it would be a better overclocker. With a little voltage tweaking and hand-tuning, we managed to achieve stable operation with the front-side bus turned up to 230MHz, and with the maximum CPU multiplier locked at 17X, this gave us a final overclocked CPU speed of 3.91GHz, all using a standard Intel brand cooler.
The real raison d'être for this motherboard is gaming. It carries a professional gamer's brand, after all. At stock speeds, it performs about as well as expected. The motherboard runs great, but can't make up for the speed difference between our 3.4 and 3.6GHz CPUs. Overclocking turns the tables. At these lower resolutions where our games are more CPU-limited than graphics-limited, we were able to pick up over 7% in Unreal Tournament 2005 and just a hair less than 7% in Doom 3. This is enough to catch up to or even surpass the faster 3.6GHz CPU. Mission accomplished."
 Final Thoughts/What to Buy
"The Fatal1ity AA8XE is one of the best 925XE based boards we've tested. Its layout works well, and it has some nice extra features, including the audio jacks on a riser card to help reduce noise. The extra cooling on the northbridge and power circuitry deliver what overclockers need. We pumped up the front-side bus speed by 15% with a stock Intel cooler, and the system was rock solid through several days of tests. With more exotic cooling, there's no telling how high you can go: Your CPU is likely to give out before the motherboard runs into problems.
…If your priority is taking an LGA775 CPU and pushing it to its limits, you'll have trouble finding a better board. "
For the full review, go to: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1764868,00.asp
For more information on the Fatal1ty AA8XE, go here: ABIT Fatal1ty AA8XE |
