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March 2006– Bit-tech; an industry leading review site put our AN8-32X
though the mill. It seems ABIT came out a winner: "The AN8 32X is a board
with a few surprises up its sleeve and it shows signs that ABIT is already heading
back to the right tracks.
The documentation is good and it's great to see that ABIT has included
a hard copy of the user manual for its µGuru software suite - that is something
that many manufacturers don't seem to do. They'd rather give you a soft copy,
or hide the documentation away inside the main motherboard manual. If you're
having problems with something, you'd rather not have to look for the solution
to the problem. There are also driver disks for the Silicon Image 3132 disk
controller and also NVIDIA RAID drivers for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions
of Windows."
The board was unique in its design and overclocked in typical ABIT fashion.
"We managed to get the board running fully stable at 340MHz HTT with
the memory running at 272MHz 3.0-3-3-8 with 2.9V vDIMM. We achieved this on
the 8.0x multiplier without any stability problems at all. We were pretty impressed
with this in all honesty. With the memory running in 1:1
We ran around 64 hours of stress testing on this motherboard with bit-tech's
stability suite comprising of 3DMark05, Prime95 and IOMeter to simultaneously
stress all components on the motherboard. It is not a requirement for the motherboard
to flawlessly complete the whole stress testing period and most don't make it
through it. What it does do is weed out the motherboards that can't stand up
to heavy abuse, as they fall over within the first couple of hours. Some boards
we've tested have fallen over inside the first few minutes, too.ABIT's AN8 32X
survived well"
 Their
conclusion is that ABIT’s back in the market in a big way: "There are
a lot of things to like about this board
The BIOS has lots of tweakability, but we feel that ABIT has only provided a
taste of what is possible from this board. With more voltage options, we feel
that this board would be even more attractive to enthusiasts and overclockers
alike. Having said that, the lack of voltage adjustment isn't going to stop
overclockers from getting a soldering iron out and installing their own voltage
adjustment controls. The important thing is that the range of voltages available
for the tweakable options are comprehensive and ample for most overclockers.
On the subject of overclockers, the overclockability of the AN8 32X
was more than impressive."
We certainly created an optimum platform for the enthusiast and look set to
take the market by storm: "ABIT has created a very solid and overclockable
motherboard in the AN8 32X - it competes well on price with its competitors
and performs about how we would expect it to perform. It's also remarkably stable
too. The board overclocks well, and the tweaking options are reasonably comprehensive,
but we feel that it could be even better with more tweaking options available
to the enthusiast.
We really like the AN8 32X a lot and it's very close to being a board
that we'd recommend you buy above anything else in its price range. We're looking
forward to getting our hands on some of ABIT's upcoming boards - this is a great
step in the right direction for the Taiwanese motherboard maker."
For the actual review, go here:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2006/03/28/abit_an8_32x/1.html
For more information on AN8-32X, go here:
http://www.abit.com.tw/page/en/motherboard/motherboard_detail.php?pMODEL_NAME=AN8+32X&fMTYPE=Socket+939
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