Abit’s Fatal1ty-AA8XE motherboard

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.

Board layout
Abit is trotting out a new color palette for its Fatal1ty-branded products. The blood-red-and-black color scheme is a refreshing break from the orangey red hue that graces the rest of Abit’s lineup. Red isn’t exactly an original motherboard color, but the shade Abit uses on the Fatal1ty board is deeper and darker than red boards from MSI and others. I’m not too crazy about the board’s light blue north and south bridge heat sinks, though. The AA8XE would look much better with black coolers.

Pastel heat sinks aside, the Fatal1ty board’s layout is pretty good. I’m particularly fond of the placement of the four-pin 12V power plug, which sits on the top edge of the board. Unfortunately, the AA8XE’s 24-pin power connector is located mid-way down the board, which makes clean cable routing a little more challenging.

The Fatal1ty-AA8XE’s socket area is pretty crowded thanks to the board’s tall north bridge heat sink and wrap-around OTES shroud. Intel’s stock LGA775 heat sink is a perfect—if tight—fit, but larger third-party heat sinks like Zalman’s gargantuan CNPS7700AlCu aren’t as accommodating.

Despite tight socket clearance, there’s plenty of room between the Fatal1ty board’s PCI Express x16 and DIMM slots. Memory modules can easily be removed and replaced without messing with even the longest of graphics cards. All board-mounted components around the PCI-E x16 slot are short enough that they shouldn’t interfere with double-wide graphics card coolers, either.

The Fatal1ty-AA8XE is populated with a full array of PCI Express and PCI slots, including a couple of x1s for PCI-E peripherals that have yet to emerge. Don’t confuse the slot at the bottom of the board with a backwards PCI-E x1; it’s actually a special connector for the AA8XE’s audio riser card.

Moving to another corner of the board, you’ll find that all of the Fatal1ty-AA8XE’s storage ports are neatly consolidated in a tight cluster. The locking Serial ATA ports are especially nice to see given the fact that normal SATA ports tend to hold cables rather loosely.

Speaking of little touches, notice that the Fatal1ty-AA8XE boasts not only a two-digit POST code display that’s a godsend for troubleshooting, but also a pair of handy on-board power and reset buttons. Although Abit has been putting the power and reset buttons on its high-end Pentium 4 boards for years, the buttons have, curiously, never made the migration to the company’s AMD-based offerings.

The Fatal1ty-AA8XE’s port cluster is dominated by a pair of OTES exhaust fans, which I’ll discuss in a moment. Abit also manages to squeeze the board’s PS/2, LAN, and some of its USB and Firewire connectors into the port cluster. The rest of the board’s USB and Firewire ports (four more USB and two more Firewire) are available through onboard headers

With little room in the AA8XE’s port cluster, Abit is forced to move the board’s audio ports to a riser card. The card features a full array of analog and digital input and output ports, including a shared line in that handles both analog and digital S/PDIF input. Abit claims that this AudioMAX riser reduces interference and improves sound quality by moving the ports off the board, but I have to wonder how effective the solution can be considering that the codec chip isn’t on the riser.

All the little things
It’s the little things that really separate high-end boards from the rest of the field, and Abit has certainly paid plenty of attention to detail with the Fatal1ty-AA8XE.

While hardly a “little” thing, at least in size, the most obvious extra on the AA8XE is the massive OTES cooler. A pair of temperature-controlled fans exhaust warm air from around the board’s CPU socket and power circuitry, which should help with stability when overclocking. The board’s MOSFETs also feature tall heat sinks that should aid in cooling. Fortunately, the pastel blue color of the MOSFET coolers is well-hidden under the black OTES shroud.

OTES is old hat for Abit, but the Fatal1ty-AA8XE’s RAMFlow cooler is all-new. The dual-fan memory cooler clips onto the DIMM slot retention taps with a pair of beefy spring-loaded arms, but the retention mechanism is cumbersome at best. Spring tension is strong enough to securely hold the cooler in place, but if your hand slips during installation, there’s enough tension to launch the cooler violently into the air and potentially across the room. A screw-on RAMFlow cooler would require tools to install and remove, but I’d certainly feel a lot more comfortable installing it.

In theory, RAMFlow is a great idea, but its implementation is a little rough around the edges. Perhaps the most annoying thing about the cooler is that it must be plugged into a fan header located at the bottom corner of the board, about as far away from the DIMM slots as possible. The RAMFlow has just enough cable to make it happen, but having to criss-cross the PCI Express and PCI slots just to get power to the cooler is a little sloppy. The board should really have a RAMFlow fan header right next to the DIMM slots.

In another nod to overclocking, Abit equips the Fatal1ty-AA8XE what it calls “OC Strips.” These strips of copper are supposed to help draw heat away from the underside of the board, particularly around the CPU socket, and improve stability when overclocking.

Like most high-end boards, the Fatal1ty-AA8XE comes with a decent cable bundle. Rounded floppy and IDE cables are included with the board, but I’m not crazy about the clear plastic that covers the IDE cable. If you’re going to bundle rounded cables with a high-end board like the Fatal1ty-AA8XE, they might as well match the board’s color scheme. You’ll need a case window to notice either way, but it’s the little things that kill.

Although the rounded IDE cables don’t match, the red Serial ATA cables nicely complement the board’s color scheme. Best of all, the cables use locking end plugs that securely hold them in place.

Abit also throws an optical S/PDIF cable into the Fatal1ty-AA8XE’s bundle. It’s a nice little touch, especially for anyone who’s planning on using the board’s integrated audio with a digital receiver or speakers.

Flashy lights are all the rage these days, and Abit obliges the trend with a set of red LEDs mounted under and around the AA8XE. The glowing effect looks cool in the dark, but you’ll need a case window to really see it at all.

The BIOS
The Fatal1ty-AA8XE’s hardware clearly caters to overclocking enthusiasts, but can the BIOS keep up?

Yes. And then some. The AA8XE’s BIOS offers a staggering assortment of overclocking options, including support for front-side bus speeds up to 400MHz. A total of five different CPU:DRAM bus dividers provide plenty of flexibility for different memory speeds, and the BIOS also offers arbitrary PCI and PCI-E bus speed control

In addition to a wide range of bus options, the AA8XE’s BIOS also delivers a generous collection of voltage tweaking options, including support for CPU voltages as high as 1.925V. Users can also manipulate front-side bus, DRAM, and north bridge voltages.

The AA8XE’s BIOS has all the memory timing options you’d expect from a Pentium 4 board, including a nebulous “Game Accelerator” setting that tightens timings even further.

Tweaking options don’t stop with performance, though. The Fatal1ty board’s BIOS also offers control over all five of the board’s temperature-controlled fan headers.

Users can easily tune temperature thresholds, reference temperatures, and fan speeds to find a balance between taming toasty Prescotts under load and maintaining low noise levels at idle. The BIOS also features a mind-numbing array of monitoring features thanks to the board’s uGuru chip.

uGuru allows users to monitor and set alarm or shutdown conditions based on temperatures, fan speeds, and even voltages. No other motherboard manufacturer even comes close to offering this level of hardware monitoring, and if you’re shy about poking around in the BIOS, Abit offers identical monitoring functionality in Windows with its AbitEQ software. Many of the BIOS’s overclocking and tweaking options are also available via Abit’s uGuru software for Windows.

Our testing methods
All tests were run three times, and their results were averaged, using the following test systems.

We’ll be looking at the Fatal1ty board’s performance against that of Abit’s AG8, Albatron’s PX915P-AGPe, and a couple of DFI’s LGA775 LANParty boards. Because the LANParty UT 915P-T12 supports two memory types, we’ve tested its application performance with both DDR and DDR2. For our peripheral performance tests, we stuck with DDR400 memory on the LANParty board.

To ensure that the Fatal1ty-AA8XE performed at its absolute best, we enabled the Game Accelerator BIOS setting, which was perfectly stable at both stock and overclocked speeds.

For a more detailed look at how the Intel 925XE stacks up against other chipsets, see our Intel 925XE review.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

• SiSoft Sandra Standard 2004
• ZD Media Business Winstone 2004 1.0.1
• ZD Media Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 1.0.1
• TCD Labs HD Tach v3.01
• Futuremark 3DMark03 Patch 340
• DOOM 3
• Far Cry v1.2
• Unreal Tournament 2004 v3270
• RightMark Audio Analyzer 5.3
• RightMark 3D Sound 1.02
• NTttcp
• Cinebench 2003
• Sphinx 3.3

The test systems’ Windows desktop was set at 1280×1024 in 32-bit color at a 75Hz 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

The AA8XE’s performance in Sandra and Cachemem’s memory subsystem tests is excellent, although the board’s write bandwidth in Cachemem falls a little short of the LANParty 925X.

Office productivity

The Fatal1ty board takes top honors in our Winstone tests, although all the results are quite close.

Gaming

With the exception of Unreal Tournament 2004, where it’s less than 1.5 frames per second off the leader, the Fatal1ty-AA8XE sweeps our gaming tests by a series of slim margins.

Cinebench rendering

The Fatal1ty-AA8XE comes out with top honors in Cinebench.

Sphinx speech recognition

The AA8XE edges out the competition for another win in Sphinx.

Audio performance

The AA8XE’s CPU utilization in RightMark 3D’s sound benchmark is abnormal at best. Scores were erratic no matter how many times I repeated the tests, suggesting that the board’s audio drivers may need a little work before CPU utilization is consistent.

Audio quality
For RightMark’s audio quality tests, I used a Terratec DMX 6fire 24/96 for recording. 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.

Fortunately, the board’s integrated audio sounds fine. At least as far as RightMark Audio Analyzer is concerned, the Fatal1ty board’s audio riser doesn’t produce higher quality audio than competing solutions. Perhaps the impetus behind its design was freeing up port cluster real estate for a pair of OTES exhaust fans rather than improving audio fidelity.

ATA performance
ATA performance was tested with a Maxtor 740X-6L ATA/133 hard drive using HD Tach 3.01’s 8MB zone setting.

The AA8XE’s ATA performance is competitive, but all the boards are pretty closely matched.

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.

As in our ATA tests, the Fatal1ty-AA8XE’s Serial ATA performance is virtually indistinguishable from the competition.

USB performance
Our USB transfer speed tests were conducted with a USB 2.0/Firewire external hard drive enclosure connected to a 7200RPM Maxtor 740X-6L hard drive. We tested with HD Tach 3.01’s 8MB zone setting.

The Fatal1ty-AA8XE uses fewer CPU cycles in our USB transfer rate tests, but throughput isn’t any better than the rest of the field.

Firewire performance
Our Firewire transfer speed tests used the same external hard drive enclosure and HD Tach settings as our USB transfer speed tests.

With Firewire, the Fatal1ty-AA8XE’s performance remains competitive with the best of the boards we assembled for comparison.

Ethernet performance
We evaluated Ethernet performance using the NTttcp tool from the 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 Chaintech’s Zenith 9CJS motherboard with a Pentium 4 2.4GHz (800MHz front-side bus, Hyper-Threading enabled) and CSA-attached Gigabit Ethernet. A crossover CAT6 cable was used to connect the server to each system.

If the Fatal1ty-AA8XE has a performance weakness, it’s with Ethernet throughput. 10/100 Fast Ethernet is just plain slow, and although the board’s PCI-based GigE controller is faster than other PCI-bound solutions, it’s over 150Mbps slower than the PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet found on the LANParty boards.

Update 6/13/2005 — We recently discovered that the ntttcp CPU utilization results included in this review were incorrect. The CPU utilization results have been removed, but they didn’t factor prominently into our overall conclusion, so that remains unchanged. A full explanation can be found here.

Overclocking
In testing, I was able to get my retail Pentium 4 520 2.8GHz stable on the AA8XE with a front-side bus of 266MHz with stock cooling and only 1.425V. The setup was rock solid for hours on end under heavy load, but higher front-side bus speeds weren’t completely stable.

Since the 266MHz front-side bus pushed my 2.8GHz chip to over 3.7GHz, the processor could have been the limiting factor. To see just how high the board’s front-side bus would go, I swapped in a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz, whose multiplier can be dropped to 12x, and was able to get the AA8XE stable with a 320MHz front-side bus. That put the processor at over 3.8GHz, so again, it’s possible that the Fatal1ty board is capable of even higher front-side bus speeds than we observed.

I’ve provided performance scores with the Pentium 4 520 running at stock speeds and with a 266MHz front-side bus below. Thanks to the AA8XE’s plentiful CPU:DRAM dividers, I was able to keep the memory running at 533MHz with 3-3-3-8 timings for both.

Although it doesn’t do much for DOOM 3, cranking the Pentium 4 520 up to over 3.7GHz does wonders for its performance in Sphinx. As always, overclocking success is never guaranteed. Your mileage may vary.

Conclusions
At over $220 online, the Fatal1ty-AA8XE is far from cheap, but it’s no more expensive than other premium 925XE motherboards. With plenty of OTES cooling, a decent cable bundle, a tweak-filled BIOS, and uGuru delivering the best hardware monitoring around, the Fatal1ty-AA8XE is definitely a premium board worthy of any Pentium 4 overclocking enthusiast.

And therein lies the problem. It’s worthy of any Pentium 4 overclocking enthusiast. Unfortunately, the Pentium 4 is a currently a lousy platform for enthusiasts and for the gaming crowd that the Fatal1ty brand caters to. The Pentium 4 may be the best that Intel has to offer, but unless you do a lot of video encoding, Athlon 64 processors are a better alternative. The upcoming 600-series Pentium 4 processors may redeem the LGA755 platform for gamers and enthusiasts, but they might not, and they’re not out yet anyway.

Apart from its less-than-desirable CPU socket, the Fatal1ty-AA8XE could use a nip and tuck here and there. For starters, a less volatile mounting mechanism for the RAMFlow cooler would be nice. The cooler’s fan header should also be much closer to the DIMM slots, and no matter what Queer Eye for the Straight Guy says about pastels, light blue heat sinks don’t belong on a black-and-red Fatal1ty board.

At the end of the day, the Fatal1ty-AA8XE is unquestionably the best Pentium 4 overclocking board to grace our labs. If you’re looking to push a Pentium 4 to its limits, the board should definitely be at the top of your list. However, if the Pentium 4 isn’t your thing, hold tight. Abit has a Fatal1ty-branded Athlon 64 motherboard in the works that ought to have just as many bells an whistles for gamers and overclocking enthusiasts.