Thoughts, HEXUS.awards & HEXUS.right2reply
ThoughtsABIT's brief with the Fatal1ty AA8XE was to create the highest-performing, gamer-orientated LGA775 motherboard currently available. It has probably succeeded in meeting the brief, as no other LGA775 mainboard pays such specific attention to power-delivery, CPU and RAM cooling as the Fatal1ty AA8XE. The cooling hardware is complemented by a BIOS and Windows-based GUI that offers more voltage and parameter adjustment than any other board that's passed through HEXUS Labs. in recent times.
Overclocking performance and, in turn, the dilligence paid towards cooling, however, come at a price. £150-£160, the Fatal1ty AA8XE's online price, would usually buy you an i925XE-based board with all the features trimmings, including additional SATA/IDE RAID, dual Gigabit Ethernet, and, perhaps, in-built WiFi support. I guess you can't have it all in one motherboard. The Fatal1ty AA8XE is something of a niche product. It should only be considered by those enthusiasts who can run their LGA775 processors at 300MHz+ FSB and need a board to complement them. For example, ABIT also markets a no-frills AA8XE i925XE that can be picked up for around £100. It does away with the Fatal1ty's additional cooling and 10/100 LAN, yet it keeps most other features intact, including the impressive µGuru tech, and whilst it shouldn't overclock quite as well as the Fatal1ty edition, one would expect 280MHz-300MHz FSB with some basic tweaking.
Ask yourself exactly what you want out of a motherboard. Do you want the best feature set for £150? If so, look elsewhere. Do you want a board that, other things being equal, will probably overclock higher than other LGA775 models and offer the largest array of user-definable options? If so, the Fatal1ty AA8XE is probably the best choice. The most fundamental question for gamers/enthusiasts looking to build a gaming monster of a PC is whether it's the best gaming board, period?. The answer is no, and has little to do with how well ABIT has architected this model. Put simply, AMD Athlon 64 CPUs are the gaming CPUs of choice, as shown by the brief look at gaming results on the previous page. Buy yourself a competent S939 board and run with a mid-to-high-end Athlon 64 CPU instead. Either that, or invest in an SLI-capable motherboard for either platform.
However, if you absolutely, positively want to run a decent Intel gaming platform, the ABIT Fatal1ty AA8XE remains a great choice.
HEXUS Awards
HEXUS Right2Reply
ABIT provided HEXUS with the following comments on the review:The ABIT Fatal1ty AA8XE is one of the most important products we have developed in recent times.
What HEXUS have correctly identified is that we have engineered a board from the PCB up designed for gamers, providing high performance and stability on the Intel platform.
To this end, we have deliberately removed a number of legacy ports which Fatal1ty and other gamers advised us were not required, and utilised the space to provide a really powerful cooling solution.
It's true that with the extensive cooling solution there is little room available for sound ports, but we moved them to a separate daughter card and created AudioMAXT for another reason too; we found that the chances of interference, both from other electrical components and the electro-magnetics in the fans, is greatly reduced. Along with Dolby Digital LiveT certification (the first motherboard to achieve this) the 8-channel sound solution on the ABIT Fatal1ty AA8XE provides the outstanding audio quality gamers have come to expect from modern titles.
I'm glad that HEXUS enjoyed discovering the new BIOS options; it's something we really focussed on with this product, so advanced users can milk their components for maximum power. At the same time we try to make it relatively straightforward for less experienced users to enjoy the benefits of our BIOS engineering, and the Game Accelerator and other BIOS option presets allow the beginner to immediately unleash some of the extra potential in the ABIT Fatal1ty AA8XE.
The idea behind the dual LAN was to enable gamers to be connected to a LAN or play online with one connection, and then download patches and surf the internet on an independent connection without adversely affecting their online/networked game connection. Like most features, it's always nice to have more, and Dual Gigabit LAN is something we might see from ABIT in the near future.
I'll certainly take on board the point about the problems experienced downloading the one-click BIOS updates from our website; I have raised this with the web team, and I certainly hope it is something we will improve in the very near future.
At ABIT we are proud of our history of innovation and engineering, and we are certainly honoured to receive both the "HEXUS.gaming" and "HEXUS.eXtreme" recommendations from HEXUS, which we shall add to the other awards the ABIT Fatal1ty AA8XE has earned.
Michael Littler
Public Relations
ABIT Computer (UK) Corporation Ltd