ABIT Fatal1ty Motherboard Review at [H]

I wish it was anything surprising in it. But sadly enough it was exactly was I expected.. :( What bothers me a little is that the hype and the name will sell these boards anyway and I feel a little bit sorry for the guys buying "the best" for top dollars - but thats life
 
Could we compare Jonathans input to race car driver input? Race car drivers talk in terms like "the car understeers" or "the suspension is too soft" and it's the engineers job to find out exactly what the driver means.
I think the making of this board was something like that. Jonathan suggests something he would like into his rig, and then Abits engineers make it happen. The board will most likely be what Jonathan wanted but won't suit others. To each is his own....

I think I'll wait for the AMD "Fatal1ty" line... ;)
 
Yupp Bendil might be right.. However I would like someone with a tech degree and a lot of experience to look at how this board was built. I wonder if ABits Financial problems didn't make Abit cut a few corners to much. But i have no idea it is just me speculating...
 
I'm a hardcore gamer and I have chosen an Intel based rig. However I won't deny the power of the Athlon 64 in games. It doesn't make sense to me to market this twords gamers and not have an AMD solution.

Mr. Fatal1ty himself probably uses an A64. It's like a product sponsership deal. He says and does whatever Abit pays him to do or say.
 
The reason he chose Intel is because the deal was made over a year ago. It's taken that long for the board to appear in the retail channel. 1 year ago, Intel was still the king scaling their chips faster and faster. Then AMD came out with the FX line and wiped the floor. That's why you hear the rumor of an AMD board next.
Yes, I disagree with his marketing statement and think he should change it.
This board would probably kick butt in a multitasking photoshop environment, where the person does some gaming.
 
It is funny that Wendel says:
Features that gamers don't use were removed from the board, freeing up performance and allowing us to add features that you would actually use.
yet the board comes LOADED with junk. In all honesty, if I were to build a Mobo for GAMING only, there would be only one Lan card, no FW, 1 PCIe x16, maybe 1 PCI and 1 PCIe x1 slot and not all this JUNK. Also, a gaming PC doesn't need more than two SATA connector etc...


anyway... my rant.
 
Frallan said:
Yupp Bendil might be right.. However I would like someone with a tech degree and a lot of experience to look at how this board was built. I wonder if ABits Financial problems didn't make Abit cut a few corners to much. But i have no idea it is just me speculating...

I guess I know where I stand with you when it comes to judging motherboards. :p

Seriously, I do not want an engineer telling me about computer equipment as they are not going to relate it to real world use. If there was actually any value in that, all you would need is a detailed build spec sheet. And quite frankly that is going to tell you nothing about the board and its quality overall.
 
mjz_5 said:
Just a small question. Why is there an Intel Pentium Extreme overclock but no AMD FX CPUs overclock in your gaming benchmark section. Because of these, it makes the Pentium look far superior than its better AMD counterparts.

We overclock the motherboard we are reviewing. We do the same in AMD reviews.
 
qdemn7 said:
My thoughts exactly when I heard about this board. Kudos Kyle, this is the kind of reporting I expect from the [H].

One thought though. When the 915 / 925 chipsets were announced, within days every mobo company had multiple models of boards announced or available. Compare that with the trickling in of NForce 4 boards. Look how damn difficult it is to find a NF4 board, and the price premiums some have paid and are paying. Even the fact that the the Inquirer reports there are large numbers of unsold 9XX boards (probably for just the reason Kyle mentions), it still doesn't say much about Nvidia.

Well if you look at the history of nForce chipsets, every release has been this way. In fact, the nForce4 is probably one of the fastest to market yet.
 
NoGodForMe said:
This board would probably kick butt in a multitasking photoshop environment, where the person does some gaming.

Well pretty much ANY 925/915 is going to be capable of that....
 
meh, why is it co-branded, this sucks. :mad:
Any idea if abit is going to come out with a non-fatili1234 product?
 
But, how many folks really water-cool their system.

I talk to thousands of gamers and enthusiasts in my store and I would say 1 out of 500 water-cool their rigs.

I run the striped down version of the board (AA8XE) in my personal rig and I would like to say that is stable, cool and without hassle. Nice.
I also run a P4 3.46 1066 FSB ( at 13x multiple) and I like the smoothness of my HT P4 for my work and I have no complains about gaming what so ever. I would like to see some day ( and maybe ill try it here ) is a " Pepsi "challenge between an AMD FX-55 and an Intel P4 3.46EE and see if customers can tell. I really don't think they will. Do you? I think I could run an 875 rig with a 3.0E and folks could not tell the diff. Ill try it next week and ill let you know.

Nice work Kyle and crew. you help us purchasers out there pick the prods to carry all the time.
 
The one thing I am confused about with this article is why the other boards weren't tested with Overclocked settings. After all, the main thing Abit is about is Overclocking.

When testing Abit boards you should do it backwards. Max OC all the systems in the review and THEN if you have time do "default settings" for as many systems as you can.
 
lpnakira said:
I would like to see some day ( and maybe ill try it here ) is a " Pepsi "challenge between an AMD FX-55 and an Intel P4 3.46EE and see if customers can tell. I really don't think they will. Do you?

The next system I build will personally be an Intel P4 system. I am currently using an FX-53 that I built for playing DOOM 3 and HL2. It was PAINFUL going to an AMD system on the desktop side of things as the lack of HyperThreading is hard to adust to. I have adjusted to the lack of the creamy goodness that is HT now, but the fact is that I still miss it and want it back.

The damn CPUs are so fast now, that on the high end it would be hard to Pepsi Challenge any of them and tell them apart. It is all about the GPU baby! ;)


lpnakira said:
Nice work Kyle and crew. you help us purchasers out there pick the prods to carry all the time.

Thanks for the kind words. I think this has probably been our best year yet for calling "the products" in the motherboard market. While one pick stands out in my mind as a bit shaky at first, I think we hit homeruns all year long. I think 2005 will be a great motherboard year as well.
 
arentol said:
The one thing I am confused about with this article is why the other boards weren't tested with Overclocked settings. After all, the main thing Abit is about is Overclocking.

When testing Abit boards you should do it backwards. Max OC all the systems in the review and THEN if you have time do "default settings" for as many systems as you can.

The reason we do NOT do that is simple. I don't think a motherboard should be stripped down to a simple number on a graph. If you want to know about the OC capabilities of another board, I highly suggest you go read some of our review on it. We do not use systems that are not reviewed on our own pages. There are so many things that go into making a good enthusiast motherboard that I think it would be irresponsible to compare the numbers in that manner.

Quite frankly, if you read our conclusions from the past year or two, you will see where benchmark numbers rarely come into play when we talk about the value of the board. In this particular review we focused a bit more on it because of the claims that were being made in terms of performance. We would have loved to have had said, "and he backs them up," but that was not the case and it needed to be pointed out.


I hope that helps you understand our angle on that a bit. It is not to make one look better than the other and you will see that we do that in every motherboard review regardless of board maker or CPU platform.
 
Well what can I say im still going to get the board for a few reason's of my own you all have good points. I my self will say yes AMD is faster in games and out of games in some case's but HT for me all the way. Something abought being able to play two games at once still rules but keep in mind need lots of ram say abought 1.5gigs and two hard drives. Try it one day. I can run Unreal 2k4 and 2k3 with no frame or loading time droped with both going. But I will say my friends 64 system killz me in Doom3 dam. I my self feel that this board will be the right thing for me for im going water cooling for Overclocking. I just like the fact it has cooling on somethings and the push pins on the northbridge. Makes it alot better and gives more options for watercooling. Plus I have read rummors that this chip set will support the 64bit cpus.

Edit: And yes I would like to know how the Challenge goes after all most review's there is only a 20 to 35 frame diff which after 65 frames your eyes can't see most can't and if you can clame a games runs smoother when going at 120 maybe so but your saying you can see 120 frames.
 
So would the P5AD2-E be better for the size of my e-penis? jk :D I'm torn between the fatality and the P5AD2-E, and at the same time the lack of 6800GT PCIE cards(for a reasonable price) is keeping me from getting either:( Thanks for reviewing both though, should make my decision much easier.

I also had a chat with some foreign chick from abit @ the winter cpl this last december. Honestly I was too busy hitting on her and starring at her chest to listen to what she had to say.
 
Kyle,

Can you elaborate on this quote from your article:

You have to remember that when you OC a motherboard you are literally changing the positioning of all the 1s and 0s that make up the data.

This was in relation to Prime95 not working with 325 Mhz FSB. What does OC'ing the FSB have to do with the position of the 1's and 0's? Hopefully you were being sarcastic in your statement, but if you were serious please enlighten us non-believers.

From my perspective Prime95 is an application just like all others. Where it is unique is that it compares the calculation results it gets to known good results. If they differ it stops test execution. In any sort of oc'ed environment you increase the chances of getting a calculation error, hence, why you are running the program in the first place. Anyway, not a big deal. That quote just struck me as odd.

-Nv
 
Nvidiot said:
This was in relation to Prime95 not working with 325 Mhz FSB. What does OC'ing the FSB have to do with the position of the 1's and 0's? Hopefully you were being sarcastic in your statement, but if you were serious please enlighten us non-believers.

Do you understand how data (1s and 0s) is carried on the wave? When you overclock components you are literally changing the shape of the wave that carries the data. All the ones and zeros are not where they used to be. This is the cause for your system being unstable depending on the overclock. Sometimes, things are just off enough to cause certain programs to crash, and sometimes things are so far off that the system will not boot at all. Have you seen an OCed system that would run one program and not another? Why do you think this is? To put it in layman's terms, it is because the program no longer is able to read the data properly.

Overclocking in most instances creates some form of data corruption, especially at "high" OCs. This corruption comes from pushing our systems too far beyond spec and the waves getting a bit too far from what they should have been originally.

Make sense? Don't make me pull out the Oscilloscope !
 
Nvidiot said:
That quote just struck me as odd.

-Nv

To follow up on that, what exactly do you think happens when you start pressing beyond specified stock settings? What do you think happens that causes system crashes and corruptions?
 
I understand the signal wave forms are being distorted and compressed into a smaller time slice which makes telling the difference between a 1 and 0 much tougher. That makes total sense to me.

I thought you were trying to make the case that a byte that consisted of 01011001 would not be stored as 01011001! Or maybe that you thought the 1's and 0's were stored in a different memory location or processed in a different way by the CPU at higher speeds. That's what I thought you were trying to say.

Now when corruption occurs then, yes your system has treated 1's and 0's differently than it was supposed to. Otherwise a 1 is a 1 is a 1 regardless of bus speed.

The way you phrased it made me nervous.

Thanks for the elaboration.

The word "positioned" is where you lost me I believe. You meant positioned in the data stream on the bus (moving closer together), I took it to mean positioned differently in memory, the CPU, or .exe file.
 
Nvidiot said:
I understand the signal wave forms are being distorted and compressed into a smaller time slice which makes telling the difference between a 1 and 0 much tougher. That makes total sense to me.
...keep in mind that as the clock speed goes up, so does the critical nature of the rise / fall time requirements. With the faster clock speeds, can the slew rate of the bus drivers keep up, and get that '0' ramped up to a '1' level fast enough to make the "data valid" time window....?? That's one of the issues with OC'ing....one of em', anyway....:D What starts to happen is that faster and faster clock speeds start to show up the non-lineraties present in the analog side of the digital system....

...a little OT; sorry....

Good review, Kyle and staff - thanks for the info....B.B.S.
 
I'm glad I got my P5AD2. The ASUS P5AD2 and the ABIT Fatal1ty were my 2 choices and I went with ASUS because Hard OCP did a great review on the board and I've always had good luck with them. Reading this review, I would of been majorly dissapointed with this board. Especially with the weird issue with the DVD drive and the HDD not being able to be put on the same channel. That is ridiculous and would of fustrated the hell out of me.

I also had the same question about ABIT bragging about the board being the best gameing mobo around but yet it had a P4 processor instead of AMD. That just put :confused: around my head.

Thanks Kyle, great review as always
 
I find the P5A2-E to be far more interesting.

1. It's loaded with more goodies.
2. It isn't bright red
3. It performs better in almost everything (or is it absolutely everything?)
4. It doesn't have 1337 bullshit in the title. Yeh, that's a reason....

Jonathan Wendel went to my highschool (blue springs south high school, blue springs MO). It seems to me that he's a loser. And, judging by some comments, and an idiot.

ASUS seems to be far ahead of Abit nowadays. Not a bad product, but some glaring design flaws and poor ass marketing.
 
Nvidiot said:
I thought you were trying to make the case that a byte that consisted of 01011001 would not be stored as 01011001! Or maybe that you thought the 1's and 0's were stored in a different memory location or processed in a different way by the CPU at higher speeds. That's what I thought you were trying to say.

Ah, that clears it up for me and how you were seeing what I was saying. I will do a better job to explain myself next time. Thanks for asking the question and bringing my attention to it.
:)
 
The thing that suprised me was the fact that the memory ran at different speeds...the whole 400 running at 533 and 533 running at 710...


however, comparing this board to the DFI 875-T, I was amazed how much better this was in terms of overclocking. This definately changes my view on the current Socket-T platform, I originally thought that the 875 chipset was a much better overclocker...
 
rayman2k2 said:
The thing that suprised me was the fact that the memory ran at different speeds...the whole 400 running at 533 and 533 running at 710...


however, comparing this board to the DFI 875-T, I was amazed how much better this was in terms of overclocking. This definately changes my view on the current Socket-T platform, I originally thought that the 875 chipset was a much better overclocker...

You should check out some other reviews of the 875p-T, mine is prime stable @ 250fsb and other sites have had similar success. Perhaps [H] got a bad one, it happens.
 
I think the otes system is nice. One thing people don't realize is just how hot the mosfets get on a prescott board under load, especially with water cooling. Before I directed air cooling directly on them, they could easily hit 90 - 100 degrees C. Even now, they always get hotter under load than my processor. I wonder about the longetivity of these new 775 boards when attention is not given to cooling the mosfets.
 
BountyHunter-Jonathan Wendel went to my highschool (blue springs south high school, blue springs MO). It seems to me that he's a loser. And, judging by some comments, and an idiot.

Now Come on just cause he is flowing his dreams or even doing something he loves doesn't make him a Idiot. Would that not make you one (mean no ill will) for call someone you don't even really know. Sure call me one but still for only being 19 and having skillz like that makes him some what Guru of his day. I for one would love to have his skillz and have abit behind me. (Is Abit the only one who sponsers gamers) Well you know there is a 50/50 on the asus and abit. Both have its flaw's trust me. I for one am very sad that abit is going down hill cause they have so much to show and gain the respect back of people. But enougth of that I think the board is cool as for color come on does it really matter and if it does try to get any nivida 6800's or even ati x8xx that are not one of two colors. Last black high end card was sapphire 9700pro's. (If you do see any new High end black plz send link) That being said I have orderd my Board and hope to see that it works fine. After all not ever board is the same some may have problems right of the bat. To make a review true you have to use three of the same board and the add then divid to get the scores but who has time for that.
 
I am interested in the Fatal1ty AA8XE. Which P4 chip should I throw in it?
 
Good review, as usual. But the "You have to remember that when you OC a motherboard you are literally changing the positioning of all the 1s and 0s that make up the data..." struck me as odd also. Almost odd enough that I was going to change my sig to that.

edit: Oh, and when did you start including this: "Feel free to discuss this product and review in our forums in this thread" Cool!
 
Bendill said:
The board will most likely be what Jonathan wanted but won't suit others. To each is his own....

I thought the same thing reading the review.

Maybe you know the Simpsons-episode where Homer mets his brother who is the owner of car-factory. Homer is allowed to build his own car. In the end no one but Homer likes the car...
 
Urbi said:
I thought the same thing reading the review.

Maybe you know the Simpsons-episode where Homer mets his brother who is the owner of car-factory. Homer is allowed to build his own car. In the end no one but Homer likes the car...

ahaha, nice analogy! It's so suitable too. Again I ask, when is this fata893ty3 bullshit going to stop and have abit make some real products?
 
Jonsey said:
I think the otes system is nice. One thing people don't realize is just how hot the mosfets get on a prescott board under load, especially with water cooling. Before I directed air cooling directly on them, they could easily hit 90 - 100 degrees C. Even now, they always get hotter under load than my processor. I wonder about the longetivity of these new 775 boards when attention is not given to cooling the mosfets.


Was it here or on AnandTech where they did a benchmark of one of the first Socket 478 Prescotts, and the styrofoam box the board was sitting on actually started to melt?
 
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NzA1LDc=

Let me get this straight, I buy this 1337 5p3ak board, and with a P4EE 3.46 on a 1066 MHz FSB and 533 MHz DDR2, I'd be wearing my ass for a hat going up against a 3800+ with 400 MHz DDR? Great, spend $600 more so I can get my ass kicked... that's a "gamer" product for you. Hell, you run the FSB all the way up to 1300 MHz (!!!), and it still loses to a STOCK FX-55 most of the time. And costs more money to boot.

:rolleyes:
 
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