Verdict: A good motherboard for overclocking, but it's £30 too expensive

We first looked at the AN8 a couple of months ago but weren't impressed by its lacklustre overclocking abilities. Since then, Abit has made a few subtle tweaks to the board and released a couple of BIOS updates in an effort to improve its overclocking performance, so we thought we'd give it a second chance.

As the AN8 is based on the nForce4 Ultra chipset, it doesn't support SLI, but it does have Nvidia's ActiveArmor hardware-accelerated firewall and support for four S-ATA II drives. However, the on-board AC97 sound is handled by the rather basic Realtek ALC658 chip, which is only capable of 6-channel surround sound.

As this is a Fatal1ty-branded motherboard, it's supposed to have loads of gamer-friendly features, plus the ability to be pushed hard. This why Abit has included four extra 40mm fans - two on the VRMs and two over the DIMM slots. The additional cooling to the VRMs is undoubtedly a good thing, but we aren't convinced that the RAMFlow DIMM coolers actually help at all. If, like us, you don't feel the need for it then you can simply leave the RAMFlow in the box, which also has the added benefit of reducing the overall noise level considerably.

There are some good design features, though, such as the EIDE ports mounted at 90-degree angles to the edge of the PCB, which makes it easier to build a tidy PC.

At the stock frequency settings the AN8 performed well, but then so did every board, except for the MSI RS480M2-IL, and that was only slower in the hard disk-intensive Paint Shop Pro image editing test.

However, the design tweaks that Abit has made to the AN8 have clearly paid off in terms of overclocking performance, as we raised the FSB from 200MHz to 340MHz, making the AN8 one of the best boards for overclocking. The BIOS offers a myriad of options, including the ability to zap the CPU with 1.75V.

The AN8 is well designed, has some interesting features and is a great overclocker, but it's also way too expensive for an nForce4 Ultra-based board. Considering that you can buy an SLI-compatible motherboard for less, we can't really see why you'd choose the AN8.

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