Gaming & Overclocking
The Fatal1ty AA8XE is marketed as the ultimate gamers' board. That may be so for LGA775 CPUs but, and it's a big but, ABIT cannot engineer the AA8XE to be faster than even a basic £75 ABIT AX8 VIA K8T890. Why? It's all down to the CPU in the memory-dependant 3DMark2001SE test, and a price-comparable Athlon 64 FX-53/4000+ is simply better.
That's equally true in DOOM 3, especially when run at lower resolutions.
And further gaming evidence is supplied by our UT2003 bot test, run at 800x600. The Fatal1ty AA8XE is touch faster than both another i925XE and nForce4 SLI board in all gaming tests, though.
Overclocking
You shouldn't really consider the ABIT Fatal1ty AA8XE if you're going to run predominantly at default CPU FSB speeds, be it 200MHz or 266MHz. That's not what the board's designed for. Given the huge array of voltage options present in BIOS and tweakable through a Windows-based GUI, and the extra care and attention that has been architected into the board with respect to cooling, the Fatal1ty AA8XE is screaming out to be overclocked.
The problem you'll encounter is just how to stress the board's FSB limit without having to resort to esoteric cooling. The majority of LGA775 CPUs run off a 200MHz FSB, so running at the board's specified FSB speed of 266MHz is difficult without plugging in expensive Extreme Edition CPUs. Just getting up to 266MHz FSB for, say, a 3.0GHz-rated Pentium 4 530 requires a stable CPU clock of 4GHz. FSB testing was undertaken by using a semi-unlocked Pentium 4 570J (3.8GHz, 1M L2 cache, 14-18x multipliers) and dropping the multiplier down to 14x. DDR memory ratio was dropped to 1:1 and various voltage lines were raised to a couple of notches above default. The end result was an absolutely stable speed of 302MHz FSB (4228MHz) with a reference Intel cooler. I'm absolutely adamant that stability at higher FSB speeds was compromised by CPU-related failure rather than the board's, and it wouldn't surprise me if the Fatal1ty AA8XE was stable at 320MHz+ FSB.
The ideal partner to the Fatal1ty AA8XE, then, would be a 266MHz FSB Extreme Edition CPU, funds permitting.