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Abit AA8 Review :: The Board
The Northbridge as you already know is the 925, but the Southbridge is the crippled version of the ICH6 chip. Instead of Intel 82801FRW, Abit chose to use the Intel 82801FR which does not have the wireless access point feature. Some may find this feature valuable. There are wireless storage devices, even TiVo devices on the market now. But some may find this feature as a burden to the IO bus and prefer to use a separate Wireless Access Point instead.  There are 3 new PCI Express 1x and a PCI Express 16x slots on the board. It leaves you with 2 PCI slots. Other than some bandwidth hungry Raid controller cards, I have not seen any need for PCI Express cards yet. For the video cards, in practice, everybody knows it does not show any significant performance effect. But that technology will help reducing the footprint and the PCB area due to less pin count. On the server side, PCI Express bandwidth will help the new 10 Gbit Ethernet and RAID controllers in the future. But I say at least one more PCI Slot would be better on this board than the third PCI-E 1x Slot.  The best thing I like about the ICH6R Southbridge is the direct support of 4 Serial ATA devices. Some DVD Recorders like Plextor and some DVD-ROMs are already available with Serial ATA interface. It is about time to get rid of those wide cables. There is a new RAID feature called Intel Matrix Storage Technology.  RAID 1 is mirroring. It is slightly slow, you only utilize the half of the storage space, but your data is secure. If one drive fails, you have a second copy. RAID 0 is striping. It is slightly faster, you utilize all the space but very insecure. If one drive fails, you loose the data on both drives. In order to have both of the security and speed, you need four drives, which is RAID 10. But Intel had a better idea. Actually it is not new. If you are familiar with Windows Server's Disk Manager, you may easily understand it. IT Managers knew this for a long time. When you are installing Windows, partition a small space on the harddrive and mirror it in the Disk Manager after installation. Use the remaining part for other purposes. Hardware RAID wouldn't allow this before. You should either mirror the whole partition or stripe the whole partition. You can do it with the new ICH6R. You can see an example on the Intel presentation page below. For example you have two 120 GB Harddrives. You mirror the 60 GB of the 2 drives and install the system and keep the important data on that partition. You may stripe the remaining 60 GB on the both drives and have 120 GB space which you can point out that storage for your video applications. Or just install games on it.  There is more to SATA features for this chipset. It supports Native Command Queuing. This feature is adopted from the SATA 2.0 specifications. Let's try to imagine 5 parallel aisles in a market. If I tell you to pick up items from aisle 1-5-3- 4, in which order would you do it? You wouldn't go back and forth between the aisles. You would pick them up in order. It wouldn't work like that for the harddrives. It would pick up the data exactly in the order you told them to pick. Native Command Queuing makes this smarter. The thing is both the chipset and the harddrive should support it. The WD Raptor harddrive has Command queuing but the chipset doesn't recognize it. May be they use different implementation of command queuing. You may see it in the Intel Application accelerator utility.  There is another feature of SATA. Hot swap feature lets you plug in or unplug a SATA harddrive when your PC is on. Some motherboard manufacturers even throw-in a bracket with the SATA and power ports on it. You can plug a SATA harddrive without shutting down your computer and without any special adapter. To be able to use these features, you need to set the AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) option enabled in the BIOS. When you set the BIOS like that, you need to use a floppy with a special driver in it during the installation of the Windows. If you don't enable it, you won't need that disk. But you cannot utilize those features. You can plug 3 Firewire and 6 USB 2.0 devices to this motherboard. 2 of the Firewire and 2 of the USB ports is on the additional bracket.  The 7.1 speaker technology is becoming standard for on-board sound. For media center PC, it will be good. Or you have a setup for a plasma TV with 7.1 sound system, and will play enhanced Doom III (ref: Creative Technology) in the middle of your living room that's fine. But setting up an 8 speaker system around your small desk and room to have the correct sound effect is really hard. Just putting around those speakers wherever it fits does not create the proper sound effect. But I have seen some crazy setups with special game cages so I will shut up at this point. If you want 7.1 speaker sound systems, you got it. It has both optical output and input too. Optical Input helps to record from digital sources like MD players. It uses Realtek ALC880 chip for the codec.      The sound control panel shows you the whole speaker setup with color coding. That really helps. It has detailed environmental audio and digital sound settings. Nice setup. I haven't notice any difference comparing to Cmedia 7.1 sound system. If you are not a fanatic audiophile, this is fine for 3D Gaming, listening to music or watching DVD's. The Gigabit Ethernet is nearly on all the motherboards by default. ABIT integrated Realtek RTL8110S for Gigabit Ethernet connection. 
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