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Bruce Willis Takes the Athlon 64 to Disneyland Badassness
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Posted: May 9, 2006
Written by: Dan "Tweak Monkey" Kennedy
 This box bounced its way across the globe before showing up at my house.
ABIT Keeps it Real
When a $200 motherboard shows up at your door unexpectedly you can't help but rejoice -- especially when you can slap it right in your PC without even reinstalling Windows. When you pull it out of the box to find it has two PCI-Express slots for SLI, a chrome heatpipe, and an LED diagnostic display, it's hard not to fall in love with it (at least briefly in the doorway). After having stressed the AN8 32X for only a week, we can state confidently that it would impress most enthusiasts. It holds onto that ABIT legacy we remember from the Pentium II BX chipset days and it's a testament that ABIT's still quite alive and kicking.
Features
The AN8 32X is powered by NVIDIA's C51D nForce4 x16 chipset with SLI, support for 8 GB RAM, and some passive cooling. From ABIT USA:
Processor
- Supports Socket 939 Athlon64/ 64FX/ 64X2 Processor
- 2GHz system bus using Hyper Transport™ Technology
- Supports AMD CPU Cool 'n' Quiet Technology
Chipset
- NVIDIA® NF4 SLI X16 / NF4 SLI Chipset
Memory
- Four 184
- pin DIMM sockets
- Supports Dual channel DDR 400 ECC/non-ECC un-buffered memory
- Supports maximum memory capacity up to 8GB
NVIDIA SLI Technology
- Two PCI-Express X16 slots support NVIDIA Scalable Link Interface
- Two full-bandwidth 16-lane PCI Express
 The cables, manuals, and bridge connector are all standard.
 It's like the emissions sticker under the hood of a car
NV SATAII 3Gb/s RAID
- Supports 4 ports SATAII 3Gb/s RAID 0/1/0+1/5
- Supports SATA AHCI, providing native command queuing & native hot plug
2nd SATA RAID
- Serial ATA 3Gbps by Sil 3132 PCIE controller
- Supports SATA RAID 0/1 NCQ
Audio
- On board 7.1 CH Audio CODEC (ALC850)
- Supports auto jack sensing and optical S/PDIF In/Out
NV GbE
- NVIDIA® Gigabit Ethernet with NV Firewall ActiveArmor
IEEE1394
Internal I/O Connectors
- 2 x PCI Express x16 (two full-bandwidth 16-lane PCI Express)
- 2 x PCI Express x1, 2 x PCI slots
- 1 x Floppy port supports up to 2.88MB
- 6 x SATA connectors
- 2 x Ultra DMA 133/100/66/33 connectors
- 3 x USB 2.0 headers, 1 x IEEE 1394 header
- 1 x Guru Link™
Back Panel I/O
- 1 x PS/2 Keyboard, 1 x PS/2 Mouse
- 4 x USB ports, 1 x RJ-45 LAN port, 1 x IEEE 1394
- 1 x S/P DIF In, 1 x S/P DIF Out
Dimension
- ATX form factor 305 x 245mm
Next Page - First Impressions
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