The Fatal1ty AN8 SLI is mainly red, though black is used to differentiate the OTES cooler, floppy drive port, PCI-E slots, CPU cooler bracket, and one set of DIMM slots. The USB 2.0 headers and IDE ports are blue for no apparent reason, though it does give the board a bit of additional color contrast without overwhelming the eye.
There are no major flaws in the board's layout, but there are several annoyances worth mentioning. First, if you're dead-set on screwing down every mounting bracket, you'll have to remove the OTES cooling system to reach the upper-left-hand motherboard mount. Also, as you can see from the picture above (and as the shot below shows in more detail), Abit has chosen to put both the auxiliary 4-pin Molex power connector and the floppy port at the very bottom of the motherboard, underneath the last PCI slot. Dropping the floppy port to the bottom of the board may be useful in terms of getting it out of the way, but it can create cable routing or cable length issues, depending on one's case configuration. Furthermore, both the floppy cable and the four-pin Molex power cable pass over a substantial section of the motherboard through space already occupied by SLI power cables, other PCI cards, and SATA cabling.
Most SLI boards only require auxiliary four-pin Molex power when running a pair of graphics cards in SLI, but the Abit manual recommends using the auxiliary connector regardless, so its placement is more important. Whether the floppy port placement is an issue will depend entirely on whether you need a floppy drive. Unless you're slipstreaming drivers, a floppy is required to install Windows to RAID arrays running off the nForce4 chipset. However, if you're one of a growing number of people who've waved goodbye to floppy drives, you may consider the port's position an asset.
No PCI card with a significant amount of "overhang" will fit into the bottom PCI slot without interfering with standard power plugs connected to the four-pin Molex connector. Even my Audigy 2 ZS had to be coaxed gingerly into place. Note that the gap between PCI slot and Molex connector is significantly smaller than the ordinary gap between PCI slots.
Abit's DIMM configuration is less than perfect; all four slots are jam-packed together—a highly questionable decision, given Abit's historical focus on overclocking performance and high memory speeds. Although perfectly acceptable at stock speeds, such tight configurations make it difficult for passive or active memory cooling to work effectively, due to the simultaneous constriction of both airflow and space. The gap between the CPU socket and the first DIMM slot is noticeably smaller on the Fatal1ty AN8 SLI than on the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe: From the edge of the CPU socket to the edge of the first DIMM, the Asus board offers 1.125 inches of clearance compared to the Abit's 0.9 inches. Measured from the edge of the CPU cooler bracket, the Asus offers a 0.76 inch gap versus the Abit's 0.54 inches. The difference between the two boards isn't very large when measured in real terms, but it's potentially enough to create a localized hotspot if combined with the lack of DIMM spacing and a larger-than-stock cooler.
This isn't the first Athlon 64 SLI motherboard I've seen scrunch all four DIMM slots together or minimize the space between the CPU socket and the first DIMM slot, but most other boards that opt for this type of layout carry additional integrated peripherals whose presence helps explain the tighter configuration. I would've preferred a more spacious layout on this board—but there's no demonstrative proof I'm aware of that Abit's layout choices lower the board's overclocking performance.
The AUDIOMAX1's input/output offerings. From left: SPDIF out, line in, mic in, line out,
center/subwoofer, rear left/rear right, and surround left/surround right.
The Fatal1ty AN8 SLI's "integrated" audio actually relies on a module that plugs into the mainboard via a proprietary slot that Abit refers to as AUDIOMAX1. Although the AUDIOMAX1 connector appears to be physically identical to PCI-E x1 slots, the slot itself sits closer to the motherboard edge than is typical for a PCI-E x1 slot and also faces the opposite direction. Abit mounts the codec chip, a Realtek ALC850, on the AUDIOMAX1 card rather than on the motherboard to help isolate it from electrical noise and interference caused by onboard components.
With the Fatal1ty board's audio ports on a riser card, the back panel port cluster is minimally equipped. Most of the available space is occupied by two OTES fans that cool the board's power circuitry. There are no serial ports, game ports, or parallel ports on the back panel, and no headers for such on the motherboard. This is probably not an issue for the vast majority of users, but it's something to be aware of if you still have a legacy peripheral or two hanging about. Given the dearth of legacy connectors and the board's position at the high end of the market, I expected Abit to include at least one additional set of external USB ports. Although the board supports up to ten USB devices, the four rear USB ports and the two more front-panel ports on the uGuru drive bay panel only allow up to six devices to connect simultaneously. The remaining four ports are accessible via onboard headers, but Abit doesn't include any PCI back plate hardware for them.
Four SATA ports and two IDE ports are all clustered in the bottom-right-hand corner of the board. Again, there's a potential clutter problem here, depending on how many peripherals you intend to hook up simultaneously. Blue USB headers are visible to the left of the SATA ports, with the front panel connectors below. Just visible in the upper-left-hand corner of the photo is the bottom of the second PCI-E x16 SLI slot; you'll have to allow space for it (and its power cabling) when you hook it up.
