Bundle and presentation
If you're into this kind of aesthetic, Fatal1ty boxes all share a common design, which is understated and pre-distressed; kind of like fashionable jeans. The oversized box is home to another deluxe ABIT package.
Part one of the bundle satisfies general installation needs. The nForce4 Ultra chipset's feature potential has been realised by ABIT, so NVIDIA's platform ForceWare drivers install pretty much every feature the board has to offer. 4 SATA cables are fine, although it would have been nice to see ABIT-branded cabling. It's not going to affect performance, sure, but the £120 price tag demands a few individual touches here and there. A couple of manuals, which cover the AN8 mainboard and µGuru features, are both well-written and easy to follow. ABIT's documentation has always been good, and the AN8's is no exception. ABIT also thoughtfully bundles in a molex-to-SATA connector.
Making our way through the second part of the bundle, ABIT also adds in its OTES RAMFlow RAM-cooling device. As we've seen on the previous page, it clips in on over the DIMM slots and provides a reasonable degree of cooling. Keeping in touch with extensive fan control, one can adjust the RAMFlow's dual fans' speed through the µGuru GUI, either from BIOS or the OS-based utility. There's also a single ATA133 rounded cable and a matching floppy cable. There's also an additional bracket that's provides extra high-speed connectivity from the AN8's on-board headers. In this case, it's an extra 2 USB2.0 ports 2 FireWire 1394a ports (4-pin and 6-pin), It seems like a case of supplying a generic bracket, too, because the AN8's Texas Instruments FireWire controller is limited to just two ports, even though the AA8XE Fatal1ty, the LGA775 version, ships with a T.I. 3-port controller. Go figure. A custom I/O shield rounds off this portion of the AN8's package.
OTES cooling takes up a chunk of space for the board's I/O section. That's why ABIT has included an add-in audio card that fits into the PCI-Express-like slot shown on the previous page. What's more, Realtek's 6-channel ALC658 CODEC also finds a home here.
6-channel sound and a couple of optical S/PDIF ports, offering digital input and outputs. The Fatal1ty AN8's on-board sound's mediocrity cannot be disguised by the use of an expensive-looking audio card. The audio quality is far lower than Intel's High-Definition Audio and NVIDIA's very own SoundStorm APU. What's more frustrating is that the SLI edition of this board uses the same nForce4 Ultra chipset but adds in an 8-channel (7.1) audio card. That should be the case here. £120 of your cash deserves more than 6-channel AC'97 sound, no matter which way ABIT tries to dress it up.
