ABIT AT8 32X

Crossfire and Socket 939 is for a lot of people, but is this motherboard the one for you?

Now here’s a name we haven’t seen for a while. ABIT appears back on track after its buyout by USI, however this product seems to have come out the door before its name change to ‘Universal ABIT’ and the associated logo change. One can only hope in the process it ditches the Fatal1ty branding, as it’s about as attractive to real enthusiasts as sanding your genitalia with a belt grinder, rubbing Deep Heat on it and then sealing it with a dash of lemon juice. Sorry Jonathan Wendell, we just don’t want to be you.

Colour-wise the board looks like it’s come out of the late nineties, sporting a similar colour to ABIT’s legendary BH6. In fact, it’s a board that’s not particularly attractive at all, with the aqua blue heatsinks clashing horribly with the burnt umber motherboard, lavender and dark blue RAM slots. It’s like being on Changing Rooms and waiting for the disaster, without Suzie Wilks to soften the impact.

Mind you, if you’re tucking it away inside a case without a window, it really doesn’t matter what colour it is, but in the days of highly stylised boards, the AT8 32X is a throwback.

In its favour, the board is passively cooled via some heatpipe goodness, giving it a tick in the checkbox of silent computing. Also in its favour is that its based on the wonderfully powerful 3200 Express chipset from ATI, matched with ULI’s M1575 southbridge (a pairing unlikely to be seen from now on thanks to NVIDIA’s buyout). If you need performance, you won’t find it lacking with this little board.

Unfortunately the onboard options are limited and the design isn’t so crash hot – in fact, the AT8 32X can be best described as a small disaster in board layout.

The main power connector is on the far side of the board, meaning your 24-pin PSU cable needs to snake across a good portion. The 12V pin is nested among a bunch of capacitors between the back connectors and the processor. The molex connector for extra power to the PCI-E x16 slots is right down the end of the board, below the last PCI slot.

Even more confounding, next to the molex power connector is an FDD connector, which would be an utter pain to route a cable from to your floppy drive, having to snake it around all the add-in boards. The fact that it’s even there is a bit odd, considering ABIT’s stance towards legacy ports – in fact a quick glance reveals that the parallel and serial ports are indeed gone, leaving the FDD connector an enigma.

There are two PCI-E x1 slots for some reason, which as usual most people will struggle to fill one, let alone both. This really isn’t ABIT’s fault – the transition from PCI to PCI-E has been just as friendly as the ISA to PCI conversion so many years ago. And let’s face it, it’s going to be Creative that tips it over the edge.

Considering the X-Fi’s relative newness in the market, it could be a while before anything develops on this front and the rest of the world follows suit.
Those who actually use the board for Crossfire with dual slot cards will as usual sacrifice one of their PCI slots, leaving only one available. This is an annoying proposition for those who already have a sound card, and want to add a physics card or TV tuner.

Two extra SATA ports are made available above the usual four, thanks to the Silicon Image 3132 controller. Unfortunately they’re placed near the controller at the back of the board, meaning cables will need to be snaked around the CPU HSF. Obviously shorter traces are better for performance, but definitely not for convenience. Usually this also indicates e-SATA being available, with the extra ports being managed by the same controller, however they simply aren’t present, not even a passthrough bracket as Gigabyte is doing these days.

The rest is standard fare, with four SATA ports and two IDEs sitting at the bottom of the board, 7.1 sound provided by the Realtek ALC882D HD codec and Gigabit Ethernet by the Realtek 8111B controller. Optical in and outs are also provided, along with Firewire 400 and two USB ports. Two additional USB and Firewire ports are supported through an extra bracket.

The uGuru BIOS is nice and well designed, but nothing special beyond what we’ve seen with other vendor’s specialised overclocking menus, especially in the face of NVIDIA’s new wonder BIOS.

Thwocking in our regular testbench equipment, we found that the AT8 32X performed pretty much in line with other 3200 boards, as expected. It’s all in the benchmarks to the right.

Considering the poor layout and lack of features, we recommend plonking down a few extra dollars for more features on a competing Crossfire board.