ABIT AN8 is a carefully designed product that caters to the tweakers, gamers and overclockers. As we can see from the mainboard, it has all the nice features of NF4 Ultra chipset like NVRAID, Firewall, SATA II etc plus ABIT's own O.T.E.S cooling technology which helps to cool down the MOSFETs and RAM. The BIOS is filled with options that allows you to tweak your system for the best performance whether at defaults or overclocked mode.

In the test, the board is tested at SPD timings. Our SPD timing is CAS 2, 5-2-2 based on the 1GB Corsair TWINX modules. The only option we changed is the vDIMM to 2.75v. As you have seen from the BIOS pages, the BIOS has good FSB range of up to 410MHz. Multiplier (4x to 15x), Maxmemclk (100,133,166,200) , HTT multiplier (1x,2x,3x,4x,5x) can be set accordingly to achieve max FSB with a lower multiplier. CPU Vcore can be adjusted up to 1.85v. There is also a chipset voltage (1.50v to 1.80v). Hypertransport voltage (1.2v to 1.3v). HT width can also be set.

In our overclocking test, we wanted to see how far we can push our FX-53 processor. In order to do that, we lower the ram timings to CAS 2.5, 8-4-4 and ran it at ASYNC mode of 100. That is to say, if CPU runs at 200MHz, RAM is running at 100MHz or DDR200. We set the VDimm to 2.8v, multiplier at 6x, HTT to 2x and increase the CPU CLK to 400. The system could not POST at all. We lowered it further to 380MHz and it POSTED but went into a BSOD. We lowered it again and found that it is able to get into Windows XP at 365 x 6. At this combination, HTT is at 730 which is still lower than 1GHz supported by design. We went on to lower the multiplier to 5x and increase the FSB to 370 but it just couldn't POST. Looks like we have reached the limit of FX-53.

As you know, we don't really do much extreme overclocking here. What we have done is just a simple overclocking test. I am sure, you who is an expert reading this review will try out Liquid Nitrogen or Water cooling. I think this board does have the potential to reach beyond 400MHz or even 500MHz if it were to be paired with the most overclockable Winchester 3000+ CPU.

Finally, Firewire has made its way onto ABIT boards. This well laid board with OTES cooling solution is also a plus. On the down side, the lack of LPT1 and COM1/2 may or may not be a good thing as you might just need to upgrade all your old printers and modems. The audio is a 5.1ch using ALC658 codec while most other boards are already having 8 ch. Would HD-Audio be a better option for a gaming system?  Overall, a overclocker's dream board with lots of options to play with.

Pricing (US) US192~219

Pricing (UK) £126

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Pros

• Gigabit Ethernet
• USB 2.0 
• NVRAID
• Firewire
• SATA II
• Firewall

Cons

• ALC658 6 ch audio
• No COM/LPT1 port

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.