ABIT Fatal1ty AN9 32X Motherboard Review :: AN9 32X Layout

ABIT has made a name out of itself with their Fatal1ty boards. The red and black PCB matches the box colors and the BIOS color coding. The CPU area is clear of capacitors except on one side, allowing the installation of after-market CPU coolers of your choice. The capacitors are arrayed alongside the CPU Socket in a neat row.

CPU Socket

Capacitors

4-pin power

The 4-pin power connector is on top of the CPU Socket. The position is perfect as airflow isn't impeded from the PSU. The 24-pin power connector is next to the PATA controller where it should be. ABIT has three fan headers on the board with two more controlling the fans on the rear IO. ABIT includes a LED to see if there's a problem with the board, just check to make sure it reads FF. Otherwise consult the manual to see what the likely cause is.

LED

OTES GT

OTES system

North Bridge

Heat Pipe+ Molex connector

The North Bridge and South Bridges are cooled by ABIT's OTES GT cooling system. OTES stands for Outside Thermal exhaust System. It was introduced with the ABIT GF4 TI4200 OTES video card and adapted to their motherboards. The South Bridge has a heat sink covering it, leading to a heat pipe that takes the hot air to the North Bridge heatsink then to the final heat sink that's cooled by dual fans on the rear panel IO.

Fan headers

Aux fan header

Clear CMOS

Front Panel I/O

Jumpers on FP Power 1-3

ABIT put jumpers with tabs on each of the three jumper caps for the FP-Power1, FP-Power-2, FP-Power-3 and Clear CMOS jumpers. The Front Panel IO connectors are color-coded and labeled, meaning that you can't mess them up. Three USB headers are present on the board, meaning that you can install up to 10 USB 2.0 devices, the maximum that the nForce590 SLI chipset supports natively.

Discuss This Article