Abit AT8: µGuru comes to the RD480
by Gary Key on March 10, 2006 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Abit has a long and storied history as a top manufacturer of enthusiast level boards that catered to the overclocking community. Abit found itself in trouble over the past couple of years and for all intents and purposes, it was close to ceasing business operations. Fortunately, they entered into a long-term partnership with USI this past January that should ensure their financial health for the foreseeable future. This strategic partnership also signals a return of Abit to their roots as a company driven to provide the computer enthusiast and extreme overclocker with the highest performance solutions available. Although Abit just recently announced the AT8 32X motherboard based on the ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 Northbridge (RD580) and ULi M1575 Southbridge, we will be looking at the AT8 motherboard based on the ATI CrossFire Xpress 200 Northbridge (RD480) and ULi M1575 Southbridge solution. More information about the entire line of Abit products can be found here.
During our testing and general usage of the Abit AT8, we found the board's stability to be excellent and it delivered top results in the latest synthetic and game benchmarks once we were provided with an updated BIOS. However, our initial tests with the current 1.0 BIOS were not positive as the board suffered memory capability issues with our BH5/UTT chip based memory modules. The board refused to hold a CAS latency setting of 2 after reboot with the BH5 memory modules and would fail to post if the CAS latency setting was set to 3. The board also showed some post and incompatibility issues during testing with 1GB memory modules based upon Samsung UCCC chips.
However, the board worked fine with our Infineon based memory modules. We also noticed a disk corruption issue during RAID 0 operation with the stripe size set at 16k. We did not have this issue with the stripe size set at 64k.
We reported our issues to Abit and they promptly provided an updated BIOS, version 1.1, to use for our testing. We noticed our memory incompatibility issues were resolved for the most part and updated microcode for the ULi M1575 chipset solved our RAID setup issues. We have still witnessed a few memory issues that occur when switching memory modules without having set the DRAM setting in the BIOS to SPD. Also, the board requires a CMOS clear when extending the memory settings beyond the capability of the board or memory. The system will gracefully recover from errant CPU settings, but is still reluctant to recover from memory issues. We generally found that setting the memory settings manually or utilizing the SPD option had worked well as the Auto setting seemed to have the majority of issues when setting up the board or during overclocking.
However, the current iteration of the 1.1 BIOS introduced an issue that Abit is still trying to solve at this time. The board is an excellent overclocker when utilizing the stock multiplier. Our testing has revealed an issue with the beta 1.1 BIOS where the HTT setting does not like to be raised past the maximum HTT setting utilized with the stock multiplier. As an example we had no issue overclocking our AMD Athlon 64 4000+ to a 322 HTT setting at a 9x multiplier with the version 1.0 BIOS but could not reliably exceed a 256 HTT setting with the 1.1 BIOS which was the maximum setting at the stock 12x multiplier. We tried four different AMD processors and witnessed the same results in our testing. We tried various combinations of memory, video card, and power supplies along with numerous system settings without success. Abit is working on this issue currently and we expect to have an updated BIOS for further testing shortly. We would like to commend the engineers at Abit for their cooperation and diligence in working with us on these issues, but we sincerely hope that an optimized BIOS is released shortly for the existing users of this board.
Let's see how the Abit AT8 compares to the competition.
During our testing and general usage of the Abit AT8, we found the board's stability to be excellent and it delivered top results in the latest synthetic and game benchmarks once we were provided with an updated BIOS. However, our initial tests with the current 1.0 BIOS were not positive as the board suffered memory capability issues with our BH5/UTT chip based memory modules. The board refused to hold a CAS latency setting of 2 after reboot with the BH5 memory modules and would fail to post if the CAS latency setting was set to 3. The board also showed some post and incompatibility issues during testing with 1GB memory modules based upon Samsung UCCC chips.
However, the board worked fine with our Infineon based memory modules. We also noticed a disk corruption issue during RAID 0 operation with the stripe size set at 16k. We did not have this issue with the stripe size set at 64k.
We reported our issues to Abit and they promptly provided an updated BIOS, version 1.1, to use for our testing. We noticed our memory incompatibility issues were resolved for the most part and updated microcode for the ULi M1575 chipset solved our RAID setup issues. We have still witnessed a few memory issues that occur when switching memory modules without having set the DRAM setting in the BIOS to SPD. Also, the board requires a CMOS clear when extending the memory settings beyond the capability of the board or memory. The system will gracefully recover from errant CPU settings, but is still reluctant to recover from memory issues. We generally found that setting the memory settings manually or utilizing the SPD option had worked well as the Auto setting seemed to have the majority of issues when setting up the board or during overclocking.
However, the current iteration of the 1.1 BIOS introduced an issue that Abit is still trying to solve at this time. The board is an excellent overclocker when utilizing the stock multiplier. Our testing has revealed an issue with the beta 1.1 BIOS where the HTT setting does not like to be raised past the maximum HTT setting utilized with the stock multiplier. As an example we had no issue overclocking our AMD Athlon 64 4000+ to a 322 HTT setting at a 9x multiplier with the version 1.0 BIOS but could not reliably exceed a 256 HTT setting with the 1.1 BIOS which was the maximum setting at the stock 12x multiplier. We tried four different AMD processors and witnessed the same results in our testing. We tried various combinations of memory, video card, and power supplies along with numerous system settings without success. Abit is working on this issue currently and we expect to have an updated BIOS for further testing shortly. We would like to commend the engineers at Abit for their cooperation and diligence in working with us on these issues, but we sincerely hope that an optimized BIOS is released shortly for the existing users of this board.
Let's see how the Abit AT8 compares to the competition.
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CrystalBay - Friday, March 10, 2006 - link
sorry, ;)Witchfire - Friday, March 10, 2006 - link
I have to disagree that the reviewers do not follow up on comments or complaints from users. Gary has been communicating with me regularly about my concerns with the AT8 I've been having, and has been very helpful. I'm no eleite member, and haven't even managed triple digit postings, yet he took the time & trouble to listen to my concerns, attempt to recreate them on his mobo, and lend assistance.Thanks, Gary, your help and professionalism have been greatly appreciated.
bthjf1 - Friday, March 10, 2006 - link
The problem with all these reviews is that they don't go back to check what's is going one with the board they just tested with normal users. A number of peoples (one being me) have been arguing (with their helpdesk) and waiting for 3 months now for Abit to provide a proper support for the intel Presller core on the AW8 motherboard series (i955) or proper support for different type of memory. All I can say Abit support is very very poor and I will strongly advice anybody thinking of purchasing a board from Abit to look elsewhere. Just poppin's into http://forum.abit-usa.com/showthread.php?t=102711">http://forum.abit-usa.com/showthread.php?t=102711 and have a read ...Gary Key - Friday, March 10, 2006 - link
I cannot comment on other review sites, but I can assure you that Wes and I do go back and look at the history of the motherboards tested and take comments from users very seriously. I know I spend at least 10 hours a week assisting users with their issues and at times being an arbitrator for the customer with the supplier. We both spend a similar amount of hours each week if not more working directly with the suppliers on issues and trying to ensure problems are solved or at least corrected in the next product design. While we are not always successful, I do believe you would be surprised at the number of issues that are solved quickly. I will bring up your AW8 issue with Abit this weekend. :)
bthjf1 - Saturday, March 11, 2006 - link
Thanks for any help you can provide. The comment was not direct to Anandtech but to a couple of other review sites which didn't really care (ie: not my problem). The concern with Abit is since the takeover from USI the support have not been great ~ total of communication. I've been reading Anandtech for many years (too long !) and my post was more to get some help with Abit . They will listen to Anandtech since you can reach millions but not necessary a single user ;-)Jon
Plasmoid - Friday, March 10, 2006 - link
I have to agree with you, Abit need to sort out their support.The benchmarks prove that this is a great motherboard, interestingly it outperforms all its rivals at stock just like the AN8, but the bios lets it down (interestingly just like the AN8)
If they can sort out these bios issues fast it should be a fantastic value motherboard. There were problems with the temperature reporting on the AN8 and incompatibility with XI-FI cards from creative that took much to long to address though. Im sad to say this kind of thing is what you can get with Abit. Hopefully it is a short term problem that they have had over the last 6 months.
All bad things said im really happy with my abit motherboard, and the OCGuru certainly is a godsend for overclockers. Havent seen such things as completly dynamic fan speed control in any other motherboard.
Patrese - Friday, March 10, 2006 - link
Am I the only one who finds this kind of positioning of the IDE connectors crappy? Most people who are buying PCs now are using SATA HDs, so the connectors should be exactly where they are, on the low-right of the board. But the IDEs are used for CD-RW/DVD-RWs drives mostly, and would be much better suited to the top right of the board IMO. I got a good-old AN7 and I just hate tbe IDE cables crossing my case from top to bottom just to reach the connnectors...Besides that, great review and promising mobo, once the BIOS is fixed. It's great to see Abit back!
n7 - Friday, March 10, 2006 - link
I think his comments were a tad harsh, but i am one of those users who read the Asus A8R-MVP review here, & got pretty excited.I actually starting spreading the praises on forums i visit of this great value mobo.
Then i got the mobo, & actually, i was quite happy with it.
For a few weeks, that is.
Then i started discovering all sorts of issues, the worst being the ethernet hanging/crashing, something which many others have also had issues..
I now hear there's a Marvell driver directly from their site that supposedly fixed the problem, but i've already bought an ethernet card, so i don't really care to try it, since both the driver from the CD & the driver from Windows update didn't work properly.
Another issue i've encountered is wildly fluctuating vcore. (1.31-1.41V, for example! - with overvoltage disabled)
Others have also reported this. I am using software to measure this, so it's possible that it is incorrectly reading it, but i'm guessing not.
Another problem is that even smaller overclocks aren't stable in games for me, whereas i had much higher OCs stable with my previous Neo2.
I cannot figure out why yet, but it seems to be either the fluctuating vcore, or it's been mentioned that the RAM isn't even stable even with a divider when using 1T.
It's one thing for OCs to vary between mobos, but going from 2.55 GHz to 2.2 GHz with the same hardware? No way.
I am going to test things this wknd with the RAM @ 2T, & see if that fixes the stability issues, but one shouldn't have to run RAM @ 2T on any good motherboard in the first place.
Anyway, what i'm trying to say is that while some many not have had trouble, a lot of people have, which is why there's negativity surround that A8R-MVP reviews.
As far as i am concerned, it seems like Asus used us who bought the A8R-MVP as beta testers so they could release the A8R32-MVP with the issues fixed...
Zoomer - Tuesday, March 21, 2006 - link
I get a similar problem with vCore on their A8N-E. Perhaps its due to Asus's choice of voltage regulator?Pete84 - Friday, March 10, 2006 - link
With conroe ~6 months away, I wonder how badly AMD's FX and high end sales will suffer. Who is going to spend out for a brand new system when it will be destroyed by Conroe?