The first step in Abit's bid to reclaim the enthusiast market could be the AN8 32X, a Socket 939 Athlon 64 motherboard based on NVIDIA's nForce4 SLI X16 chipset. One of only three X16 motherboards available for sale, the AN8 32X doesn't mess around with cheesy gimmicks or Fatal1ty branding. Instead, it's equipped with useful peripherals, passive chipset cooling, loads of overclocking potential, and best-in-class fan speed control and hardware monitoring. But is all that enough to keep up with the latest enthusiast-oriented motherboards from Asus, DFI, ECS, and MSI? Read on to find out.

The specs

At the heart of the AN8 32X is NVIDIA's nForce4 SLI X16 core-logic chipset. Each member of this two-chip team is capable of driving a single PCI Express graphics slot with 16 lanes of connectivity. Between the two chips is a HyperTransport interconnect just fast enough to match the bandwidth of 16 PCI Express lanes—8 GB/s. That's sufficient bandwidth to keep the second graphics card in an SLI rig fed. Although this chip-to-chip interconnect has to accommodate other types of I/O traffic, as well, HyperTransport's traffic management and bandwidth reservation capabilities ought to prevent significant congestion problems. Indeed, our testing has shown the nForce4 SLI X16 to be a competent performer.

This certainly has its share of south bridge I/O components. RAID is supported in ATA and Serial ATA flavors, and the chipset has the ability to span arrays across drives connected to both interfaces. The south bridge also houses a Gigabit Ethernet controller, complete with an ActiveArmor offload engine, and hardware support for NVIDIA's firewall software.

High-end boards usually complement the nForce4's integrated GigE controller with a second networking chip, but that's not the case on the AN8 32X. The board does have an auxiliary Serial ATA RAID controller from Silicon Image, though. That chip provides a couple of extra SATA ports, and since it rides the PCI Express bus, it won't have to tussle for limited bandwidth with the board's PCI-based Firewire chip, or its two PCI slots.

Of course, no discussion of an nForce4 motherboard spec sheet would be complete without a nod towards the crab. Like just about every other motherboard on the market, the AN8 32X taps Realtek for its audio codec. The ALC850 provides eight output channels for AC'97 audio, but it can't handle high-definition sampling rates or resolutions, and it does all its positional 3D audio calculations in software.