Abit AN8 SLI Motherboard Review :: Layout and Features

Layout of the ABIT AN8-SLI uGURU board is mostly excellent. One especially nice placement is the 4-pin power connector above the CPU. On many boards, this connector is below the CPU impeding airflow. The 24-pin ATX connector is in a good position below the memory slots and clear of the IDE ports. The positioning of the floppy drive connector is on the far rear of the board. If you have a big case with the floppy drive higher than normal, you may need a longer floppy drive cable. The CPU area is clear of obstructions, allowing good airflow. ABIT included a LED that shows boot errors. If your system boots correctly, the LED will display FF.

4-Pin Power

CPU Socket

Jumpers

LED

AN8 SLI

Battery

ABIT has several special features on their board. First is the ABIT Q-OTES cooling solution. Q-OTES stands for Quiet Outside ThermalExhaust System covering the nForce4 SLI chipset on the board. One result of there being no chipset fan on the board is the board is extremely quiet. There is a heat pipe that transfers the heat from the chipset to a heat sink on the rear of the board.

uGURU is ABIT's tweaking program. ABIT put a lot of care into the uGURU program, allowing users to set voltages, PCI Express clock speeds, and more. OCGuru is the overclocking component of uGuru. Here, you can overclock the CPU automatically, or set the CPU frequency to Turbo (9% overclock). Unfortunately, my 4000+ CPU from AMD is not a great overclocker, causing unsuccessful overclocks to 2592MHz (Turbo setting). Normal mode gives a 2% overclock, (2448 on a 2400 CPU) which was entirely successful.

uGURU

Flash Menu is ABIT's Windows BIOS Flash program. From here you can update your BIOS via the internet in quick easy step or do it in one click. You can also download a BIOS file from ABIT's site and flash the BIOS from the FlashMenu. Support is important to me as a consumer and a reviewer. ABIT has a program in their utilities called BlackBox. With this program you can send ABIT a detailed system report and a description of a problem you might be having with your system.