Abit’s AN8 32X motherboard

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.

The board
Aesthetics may be the least important attribute to consider when evaluating a motherboard, but the AN8 32X looks pretty good. The board is dressed in Abit’s unique shade of reddish orange, complete with blue anodized heat sinks and a smattering of ports and slots that don’t clash with the color scheme.

Still, layout is more important than looks. There are a few issues with the AN8 32X’s layout that are less than ideal, starting with the placement of the board’s four-pin auxiliary 12V connector. The connector’s off to the left of the CPU socket, where its cabling can clutter air flow around the processor, VRMs, and case exhaust. Abit has also put a couple of Serial ATA ports up by the auxiliary 12V connector, creating the potential for even more disrupted air flow around the CPU socket.

The auxiliary SATA ports are about as far as you can get from the hard drive cage in most chassis, making their positioning particularly curious. According to Abit, putting the extra ports in this position allows users to easily run cables to external drives. However, there’s no cut-out in the board’s I/O shield to facilitate external routing, and you’d also need to run power outside of the case. If Abit were really serious about external SATA drives, it would have put a couple of eSATA connectors in the port cluster instead.

Without any power or Serial ATA cabling getting in the way, the AN8 32X’s CPU socket is relatively roomy. Taller north bridge and VRM heat sinks do pop up from the board’s rows of Rubycon capacitors, but they’re not close enough to the socket to interfere with larger coolers like Zalman’s CNPS7700. We’d rather have slightly larger passive heat sinks than rely on active chipset cooling, anyway.

Interestingly, the heat pipe that connects the AN8 32X’s south bridge cooler to the larger VRM heat sink doesn’t pass through the north bridge cooler. Abit has to use a low-profile heat sink on the south bridge to ensure clearance for longer graphics cards, so that chip has a particular need for a heatpipe’s ability to transfer heat from one area to another. The north bridge is a less complex chip and can get by with a higher profile cooler; Abit uses only an aluminum heatsink on it.

The AN8 32X’s chipset heat pipe hugs the board, so it won’t interfere with any expansion slots. Double-wide graphics cards will cannibalize one PCI or PCI Express x1 slot, though. In fact, with a pair of double-wide cards installed, users will be left with just one PCI slot and one PCI-E x1 slot. SLI users will have to choose their expansion cards carefully.

Anyone running a pair of GeForce 7800 GTX 512 or 7900 GTX graphics cards will also have to pick their Serial ATA ports with care. The long, double-wide coolers on those cards interfere with the AN8 32X’s top two SATA ports, and even the third port is a bit of a squeeze. Right-angle cables should solve the problem, but Abit doesn’t bundle any with the board. Fortunately, single-slot graphics cards leave plenty of room around the Serial ATA ports.

Speaking of ports, the AN8 32X’s backplane has plenty. Here, you’ll find TOS-Link S/PDIF input and output ports, plenty of analog audio, four USB, one Firewire, and one Ethernet port. PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports also make an appearance, but serial and parallel ports are nowhere to be found. The AN8 32X doesn’t even have onboard headers for serial or parallel ports, although it does support an additional Firewire port and six USB ports.

The BIOS and tweaking software
Abit’s original SoftMenu set the bar for what enthusiasts have come to expect from BIOS-level tweaking and overclocking. Although it was the only game in town at the time, mobo manufacturers were quick to emulate its capabilities. Decent tweaking and overclocking options are common in nearly every enthusiast-oriented motherboard BIOS these days, forcing Abit to raise the bar again if it wants to set itself apart from the masses.

Unfortunately, the AN8 32X’s memory timing options do little to distance the board from the rest of the field. All of the essential timing options are there, of course, but they’re there on just about every other Athlon 64 motherboard. Granted, there are limits to what one can do with memory timings. However, Abit could have at least offered a more diverse array of supported memory speeds. As it stands, the BIOS only offers the necessary dividers for DDR200, 266, 333, and 400 memory.

Support for four flavors of DDR may be enough for the average user, but overclockers would benefit from a greater range memory dividers, especially considering that the board’s HyperTransport clock can be cranked all the way up to 400MHz. It would also be nice to have a feature similar to DFI’s Max Cool’n’Quiet FID, which allows HyperTransport overclocking to coexist peacefully with C’n’Q clock throttling. Still, the AN8 32X’s BIOS has everything you’ll need for traditional overclocking, including processor and DDR voltage options up to 1.9 and 3.2V, respectively.

Although the AN8 32X’s memory timing and overclocking options are pedestrian by today’s standards, the BIOS’s fan speed control is second to none. Users can set independent temperature thresholds, reference temperatures, and fan voltages for all five onboard fan headers, making it easy to balance noise levels with cooling performance. The range of FanEQ variables is more extensive than most motherboards provide for just the CPU fan, making it especially impressive that the AN8 32X offers similar controls for every header on the board.

If you think the AN8 32X’s fan speed controls are impressive, check out its BIOS-level temperature, fan speed, and voltage monitoring capabilities:

The AN8 32X’s BIOS tracks a staggering number of onboard variables, and allows users to set alarm and shutdown conditions for each. Those alarm and shutdown conditions are what make the board’s hardware monitoring capabilities really shine, as they can protect against hardware damage from a catastrophic cooling failure or even a slowly sagging power supply. What’s more, these variables can be monitored from Windows with Abit’s uGuru software suite.

uGuru moves much of the AN8 32X’s BIOS functionality into Windows, allowing users to monitor system variables, set alarm and shutdown conditions, control fan speeds, and even do a little overclocking from the comfort of their desktops. It’s also possible to save a number of different BIOS profiles, each with unique overclocking and fan speed settings. Users can even tie profiles to individual applications, allowing the system to fire up its overclocking profile automatically when a game is launched, or slip into a low-noise mode during DVD playback.

It’s a good thing that Abit’s uGuru Windows software is so robust, because the AN8 32X doesn’t support any of nTune’s hardware tweaking or monitoring capabilities. That’s unfortunate, especially since uGuru lacks the memory timing options and hardware monitoring logging present in nTune. uGuru has nTune beat on just about every other front, though.

Our testing methods
Today we’ll be comparing the AN8 32X’s performance with that of MSI’s K8N Diamond Plus, DFI’s LANParty UT RDX200 CD-DR and LANParty UT NF4 SLI-DR Expert, ECS’s KA1 MVP Extreme, and Asus’ A8N32-SLI and A8R-MVP.

All tests were run at least twice, and their results were averaged, using the following test systems.

Thanks to Corsair for providing us with memory for our testing. 2GB of RAM seems to be the new standard for most folks, and Corsair hooked us up with some of its 1GB DIMMs for testing.

Our test systems were powered by OCZ PowerStream power supply units. The PowerStream was one of our Editor’s Choice winners in our latest PSU round-up.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

• SiSoft Sandra Standard 2005 SR3
• WorldBench 5.0
• TCD Labs HD Tach v3.01
• Futuremark 3DMark06 Build 1.02
• DOOM 3
• Far Cry v1.3
• Splinter Cell Chaos Theory v1.05
• RightMark Audio Analyzer 5.5
• RightMark 3D Sound 2.1
• NTttcp
• Cinebench 2003
• Sphinx 3.3

The test systems’ Windows desktop was set at 1280×1024 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests. Most of the 3D gaming tests used the Medium detail image quality settings, with the exception that the resolution was set to 640×480 in 32-bit color.

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.

Memory performance

Performance differences in our memory subsystem tests come down to how each motherboard manufacturer has chosen to tune the Athlon 64’s on-die memory controller. As you can see, there isn’t much room for differentiation, although the AN8 32X does look a little sluggish in Cachemem’s latency test.

WorldBench

Slightly higher memory latency scores don’t slow the AN8 32X in WorldBench, though. Then again, all seven of our boards look pretty evenly matched here.

Gaming

Performance is pretty close across our low-resolution gaming tests, as well.

SLI gaming performance
Our first round of gaming tests were conducted with low in-game detail levels and display resolutions, but we’ve cranked things up for a second round. These tests use high resolutions, high detail levels, and anisotropic filtering and antialiasing. We’ve tested each board with a single GeForce 7800 GTX, and we’ve also benchmarked the Abit AN8 32X, Asus A8N32-SLI, DFI LANParty UT NF4 SLI-DR Expert, and MSI K8N Diamond Plus with a pair of 7800 GTXs running in SLI. We’ve also tested the KA1 MVP, RDX200, and A8R-MVP with single and dual Radeon X850 XT cards using ATI’s Catalyst 6.1 graphics drivers.

When looking at our SLI performance results, pay special attention to the jump in performance from single- to multi-card configurations. We’re not out to compare the Radeon X850 XT’s performance with that of the GeForce 7800 GTX; we just want to see how adding a second card can improve overall performance.

Apart from an unusual—but repeatable—surge in DOOM 3, the AN8 32X’s SLI performance is equivalent to that of other nForce4 SLI X16 motherboards.

Cinebench rendering

The AN8 32X’s Cinebench performance is consistent with the competition.

Sphinx speech recognition

The Abit board is right in the thick of things in Sphinx, too.

Audio performance

Realtek’s ALC850 codec isn’t anything special when it comes to 3D audio, and it only supports up to 24 simultaneous buffers in RightMark 3D sound. At least the AN8 32X’s 3D audio performance matches that of other ALC850-equipped boards.

Audio quality
We used an M-Audio Revolution 7.1 card for recording in RightMark’s audio quality tests. Analog output ports were used on all systems. To keep things simple, I’ve translated RightMark’s word-based quality scale to numbers. Higher scores reflect better audio quality, and the scale tops out at 6, which corresponds to an “Excellent” rating in RightMark.

The AN8 32X doesn’t do particularly well in RightMark Audio Analyzer, where it turns in the poorest intermodulation distortion of the lot. Audio playback quality is bearable, particularly if your expectations are low. However, we’ve been spoiled by discrete audio cards like the M-Audio Revolution 7.1 and Creative Audigy2 and X-Fi, so it’s hard to get past the dull sound of most motherboard audio implementations.

ATA performance
ATA performance was tested with a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ATA/133 hard drive using HD Tach 3.01’s 8MB zone setting.

The AN8 32X’s ATA performance is about what we’d expect from the nForce4 SLI X16 chipset.

Serial ATA performance
Moving to Serial ATA, we tested performance with a Western Digital Raptor WD360GD SATA hard drive. Again, we used HD Tach 3.01’s 8MB zone test.

Serial ATA performance is competitive across both of the AN8 32X’s SATA controllers.

USB performance
Our USB transfer speed tests were conducted with a USB 2.0/Firewire external hard drive enclosure connected to a 7200RPM Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 hard drive. We tested with HD Tach 3.01’s 8MB zone setting.

The AN8 32X nails our USB transfer rate tests, but its CPU utilization is a little higher than the other nForce4 SLI X16-based boards, even when you take into account HD Tach’s +/- 2% margin for error in that test.

Firewire performance
Our Firewire transfer speed tests were conducted with the same external enclosure and hard drive as our USB transfer speed tests.

Unfortunately, the AN8 32X’s Texas Instruments Firewire chip looks a little slow. At least its CPU utilization is competitive.

Ethernet performance
We evaluated Ethernet performance using the NTttcp tool from Microsoft’s Windows DDK. The docs say this program “provides the customer with a multi-threaded, asynchronous performance benchmark for measuring achievable data transfer rate.”

We used the following command line options on the server machine:

ntttcps -m 4,0,192.168.1.25 -a

..and the same basic thing on each of our test systems acting as clients:

ntttcpr -m 4,0,192.168.1.25 -a

Our server was a Windows XP Pro system based on Asus’ P5WD2 Premium motherboard with a Pentium 4 3.4GHz Extreme Edition (800MHz front-side bus, Hyper-Threading enabled) and PCI Express-attached Gigabit Ethernet. A crossover CAT6 cable was used to connect the server to each system.

The nForce4 boards were tested with the NVIDIA Firewall and Jumbo Frames disabled.

ActiveArmor has lost some of its luster since NVIDIA scaled back the offload engine to solve data corruption issues, but the A8N 32X still maintains lower CPU utilization than any other motherboard to break the 900MBps throughput barrier. With performance like this, you might not need a secondary Gigabit Ethernet option.

Overclocking
For our overclocking tests, we swapped in a pair of OCZ Platinum Rev 2 DDR400 memory modules and set them to run at 2.5-4-4-8-1T timings. These DIMMs use Samsung TCCD memory chips and have proven to be great overclockers in the past. We also backed off on our CPU and HyperTransport processor link multipliers to remove them as potential bottlenecks, and nudged the memory voltage up to 2.8V.

Our first round of overclocking tests is designed to determine the maximum memory bus speed of the board, and we hit a wall with a HyperTransport clock of 270MHz.

With a 1:1 memory divider, that gave us a 270MHz memory clock (540MHz if you take DDR’s clock-doubling properties into account). No amount of fiddling with memory timings, command rates, or voltages would make the system stable with a memory bus speed above 270MHz, despite the fact that we’ve had these DIMMs up to 280MHz on other boards. 270MHz should be more than enough for the DIMMs most folks are running, though.

Since the AN8 32X allows the memory to be run at a slower speed than the HT clock, we bumped the system down to a 1:2 memory bus divider and went looking for the board’s HyperTransport clock limits.

We found those limits 100MHz later with a 370MHz HyperTransport clock. The board was perfectly stable at that speed cranking on Prime95 and the “rthdribl” demo, but any higher and it would spit out errors and occasionally refuse to boot into Windows. 370MHz isn’t the highest HT overclock we’ve seen—that honor belongs to the DFI LANParty UT NF4 SLI-DR Expert—but it’s still better than the vast majority of Athlon 64 motherboards we’ve tested.

Conclusions
The AN8 32X proves that despite over a year of financial uncertainty, Abit still knows how to build a pretty sweet enthusiast motherboard. In fact, Abit’s fan speed control and hardware monitoring are still the class of the industry, making the AN8 32X particularly appropriate for those seeking to meticulously control the performance and noise levels of their PCs. Passive chipset cooling helps, too, although the AN8 32X isn’t unique in that respect. It isn’t really unique any other respects, either, and therein lies the problem.

There was a time when Abit’s motherboards boasted more onboard peripherals and overclocking options than the competition, but those days are long gone. DFI’s LANParty boards have the AN8 32X beat when it comes to overclocking options, and just about every recent nForce4 motherboard can match its Firewire and extra Serial ATA RAID chips. Most high-end boards are offering a second Gigabit Ethernet port these days, too, a feature that’s conspicuously missing from the AN8 32X.

With its overclocking options and onboard peripherals trailing what’s offered by the competition, the AN8 32X’s unique appeal lies with its passive chipset cooler and unmatched fan speed control and hardware monitoring capabilities. If those features are at the top of your wish list, the AN8 32X is easily the best board on the market. However, enthusiasts who rank more exotic overclocking or additional peripherals higher will be better served by other offerings. Abit will have to at least match—if not exceed—those offerings if it hopes to recapture the glory of legends like the BH6.