The chips
Although the AG8 owes much of its functionality to the Intel 915P chipset, there are a couple of extra peripheral chips on-board to lend a helping hand. First, let's deal with the 915P chipset, which Abit hides under a couple of turquoise coolers.


Abit cools the 915P north bridge with a funky cooler that blows air across rather than away from the heat sink. It's an interesting design, and with the north bridge chip packing a dual-channel memory controller, PCI-E X16 graphics interface, and 800MHz front-side bus, active cooling is probably a good idea.

The 915P MCH hooks into the ICH6R south bridge chip via Intel's new DMI interconnect with 2GB/sec of bandwidth—quite an upgrade over the old Intel Accelerated Hub Architecture, which was limited to 266MB/sec. With all of the high-speed I/O it features, the ICH6R really needs the extra bandwidth. The ICH6R's Serial ATA ports support Native Command Queuing (NCQ), RAID 0 and 1, and a nifty Matrix RAID feature that combines RAID 0 and 1 arrays on different partitions to deliver improved performance and redundancy with only two drives.



In the audio department, the ICH6R supports Intel's new High Definition Audio standard, otherwise known as Azalia. Azalia can serve up to eight channels of 24-bit, 192kHz audio when paired with the right codec, but on the AG8, Abit uses Realtek's weathered ALC658 codec. The ALC658 is limited to six-channel output. The ALC658 can't do 24-bit audio, either, although its digital S/PDIF output can handle sampling rates up to 96kHz. Since we've been less than impressed with the playback quality of Intel's High Definition Audio, at least when compared with discrete 24-bit audio cards like M-Audio's Revolution 7.1, I'm not crushed by Abit's decision to go with the ALC658.

For Gigabit Ethernet, Abit uses Realtek's RTL8110S GigE controller. The chip rides the AG8's PCI bus, which seems odd given available PCI Express connectivity. However, with only two PCI slots on board, at least the GigE controller won't have to worry about sharing the PCI bus's paltry bandwidth with too many other devices.



It will, however, have to share PCI bandwidth with the board's Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 Firewire chip. The TI chip serves up three Firewire ports: one in the port cluster and two more through on-board headers.

Cruising through the AG8's chip layout brings us to the hologram-encrusted uGuru chip, which is responsible for the board's almost excessive level of hardware monitoring. More on that in a moment.



Before we get into uGuru, I should take a moment to highlight the AG8's Rubycon capacitors and POST code display. The Rubycon capacitors are Japanese-made and purportedly of higher quality than other capacitors. If you've ever lost a motherboard to leaky caps, the Rubycons should provide some peace of mind.

The AG8's POST code display is pretty self-explanatory. Rather than trying to decipher obscure beep codes, you can easily diagnose board initialization problems by reading the two-digit display. I can imagine that Abit's tech support division is just as fond of the POST code display as tweak-happy enthusiasts.