After months of waiting, ABIT has delivered their SLI version of the AN8. Without the extras of those Fata1ity, the plain vanilla AN8-SLI is definitely one of the boards that most overclockers are waiting for. Performance wise, this board does perform, on pair if not better than most of its competitors in a number of the tests done. The NF4 SLI chipset is cooled by a heatpipe which is quite unique in its class. This is nice because it does away with the noisy fans actively cooling the NF4 SLI chipset.

Features wise, this board support 2 x PCIe x 8 slots for two NVIDIA 6600/6800 series of graphics card in duo. This board supports the Athlon 64/64FX, X2 processors and dual channel DDR400. It also comes standard with 1394a, 3Gbps SATA II with RAID 0,1,0+1, GbE and NV Firewall. Although I would prefer a 1394b and probably bluetooth, they can definitely come pretty handy when you need them.

Installation of the board is easy as there is no crowding of the capacitors near the CPU socket. SLI installation still require you to swap the slot selector face up / down for the setup. Overclocking wise, this board has some amazingly large range of voltage levels for vcore, vdimm, vchipset etc. The Vdimm comes pretty useful for those running the Tccd or BH-5 to run the ram at DDR600 sync mode. In our own tests, we did managed to push the CPUCLK to beyond 355 stable with a multiplier of 6x. 6x360 is a bit unstable using default voltages. RAM was run at CAS 2.5, 8-4-4 DDR333 2T. HTT was set to 3x. As for running in Sync, our Corsair was able to do DDR600 (8x300) CAS 2.5,8-4-4 DDR400 2T. vdimm at 3.3v

In conclusion, I think this board will appeal those who wants to try crazy killer voltages to CPU and DIMM and overclock it way beyond.

Pricing

Discuss

Pros

• 1394a
• USB 2.0 
• Large range of voltages

Cons

• CPU temps seems high
• SLI Switch key, auto detect will be nice

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.