A handful of motherboard manufacturers have found ways to hack around Intel's 900-series overclocking lock, but there's a better solution: Intel's new 925XE chipset. Designed as a companion for pricey Extreme Edition chips, the 925XE natively supports a 1066MHz front-side bus and all the proper bus dividers needed to run at that speed. Best of all, you don't need to drop a grand on an Extreme Edition processor to take advantage of the chipset; it works just fine with LGA775 Pentium 4 processors designed for an 800MHz front-side bus.

Given its penchant for producing overclocking-friendly boards, it was only a matter of time before Abit tackled the 925XE chipset. They've wrapped Intel's latest core logic up in a new Fatal1ty-branded motherboard built with gamers and enthusiasts in mind. Is the Fatal1ty-AA8XE the ultimate Pentium 4 overclocking board? Read on to find out.

The specs
As always, let's kick things off with a look at the Fatal1ty-AA8XE's spec sheet.

Apart from its 925XE north bridge, the Fatal1ty board's spec sheet doesn't look much different from other enthusiast-oriented 900-series boards. Like the 925X, the 925XE only supports DDR2 memory, but it does so with front-side bus speeds at high as 1066MHz. At the south bridge, we have the ICH6R, which brims with Serial ATA RAID, including the ever-so-delicious Matrix RAID, and support for Intel's new High Definition Audio standard. Abit actually takes HD Audio one step further on the Fatal1ty-AA8XE, which also boasts Dolby Digital Live support.

Although the ICH6R serves up plenty of storage options, it's interesting to note that there are no auxiliary RAID chips on board. Serial ATA is well covered by the south bridge, but with only a single ATA/100 channel, an auxiliary RAID chip for "parallel" ATA devices would have been a handy addition to the board, especially considering its price.

Despite its lack of ATA RAID, the Fatal1ty-AA8XE isn't totally lacking in extra peripherals. The board comes equipped with dual LAN chips—one Gigabit and one plain old Fast Ethernet. Both Ethernet options are PCI-based, which is a little disappointing considering the board's PCI Express support. The fact that one of the Ethernet options is only 10/100 is a bit of a drag, too, but at least its limited throughput won't choke the PCI bus.

The Fatal1ty-AA8XE's stunning array of BIOS bus, divider, and voltage options is perhaps the most impressive part of the board's spec sheet. We'll dig deeper into the BIOS in a moment, but first, let's have a look at the board.