Final Thoughts

The ABIT AN8 SLI is a very solid mainboard making use of the NVIDIA nForce4 SLI chipset. The nForce4 SLI chipset is the top of the line for mainboards powering the AMD Athlon 64 processor platform. ABIT clearly has a top of the line performance board at an entry level price. This board looks great and offers excellent performance for the money. If you do not need 2 SATA controllers, or dual Gigabyte LAN and other features rarely used, then why eat up the system resources using them?

The ABIT AN8 SLI gives you world class performance gaming motherboard without every single bell and whistle. This might appeal to those who would like to spend a fraction of the money and still end up with an explosive motherboard fully capable of whooping the pants off boards costing twice as much. The ABIT AN8 SLI proved to us that mainstream motherboards are often as fast if not faster than the highest end offerings. Example, look at the Everest CPU and FPU scores using a relaxed memory timing, this just proves the ABIT AN8 SLI has what it takes and is clearly the best band for the buck in the nForce4 SLI category.

Currently the ABIT AN8 SLI is available in retail for as little at $129.00 USD depending on who your favorite e-tailer is. However the low cost versus performance is outstanding. Our older DFI SLI solution cost twice as much in retail, but here we get same performance and even better in some cases. This product is awesome and the µGuru allows some really great over clocking capabilities, we were able to push this board to a 250MHz with ease, but having been said we are hardware limited at the ram level, so we can only see these numbers on average.

The entire package and bundle is a great value, you get all the necessary cables, adapters, drivers, manuals, bridges to compliment this high performance sleeper board. Yes we call this board a sleeper because this board is not marketed as a high performance solution, but it purely is from our test results, anyone would be very happy with the purchase of this product and it is highly recommended.

Some of these boards will not be AMD Athlon X2 ready, in order to support the X2 platform, you will need to update the BIOS on the motherboard. However this is only a necessary upgrade on first release boards, so depending on the age of the stock your vender is selling you will determine if you need to update the BIOS for X2 support. Our board needed the BIOS update to run the X2, so keep this in mind, it might pay to have a older socket 939 AMD Athlon 64 CPU such as a Winchester core to get the board to fire up in order to flash to latest ABIT BIOS.

On an ending note this board rocks right out of the box, its fast, the benchmarks prove it and its cheap to own, so those who thought an SLI system was out of there reach can now be realized with the ABIT AN8 SLI. This board is stable, offers high performance SLI video and graphics with a super sound card that offers true 7.1 Surround sound theater style acoustics that is driven by the AC97 codec. The Peripheral performance of our HDD and DVD are excellent and provided us with excellent input output between the motherboard and the hardware.

This board is a kick ass product for cost and performance effectiveness, along with the decent size supporting accessories bundle, this SLI solution is a super way to save some money and get world class performance. MVKTech highly recommends this product.

To see more of this board check out our Innovatek Water Cooling Review.

Pros:

• Incredible features and functionality
• Excellent stability and performance
• Unique cooling design (Q-OTES)
• Great board layout
• SLI technology, future proofs expandability
• 2000MHz HyperTransport
• Supports 3Gb SATA storage disks
• Decent overclocker
• AudioMax 7.1 expansion card
• Price

Cons:

• Only 4 USB ports
• Single Gigabit LAN

ABIT Computer (USA) Corporation
2901 Bayview Drive
Fremont, California 94538
United States

MVKTech greatfully appreciates the cooperation from PNY Technologies for assisting us in this review.

PNY Technologies Inc
299 Webro Road
Parsippany, New Jersey 07054
United States