Hey guys and girls, it has been a bit hasn't it? What, you ask? Oh an ABit review (Ed: I promise, one day I will get Hilbert to stop telling bad jokes... or maybe I'll just edit them all out!). They make such quality products yet we see so few reviews regarding their products here at the Guru of 3D. It's all going to change though as a while ago we singled out a good marketing contact from their UK office from which we get regular updates and info. Along with that process of course come some reviews. Today's product is no different. ABit these days is mostly about mainboards, yet they have grown so much bigger then just mainboards. The graphics cards segment for example, although difficult to channel here in Europe, is growing steadily and Abit offers a wide variety of products in that segment also. But in addition to this they have added soundcards and I think I even noticed Parallel to Serial ATA dongles in their product lineup :)

Today we'll test one of their mainboards, armed with an orange PCB and stacked with a lot of extra features. We are taking a look at the AA8XE, which of course is based on Intel's 925XE mainboard chipset. This is the "Vanilla" version as you might call it as there is a version out with a "Third Eye" and also the Fatal1ty version.

Equipped with uGuru tools and a powerful marketing slogan in the lines like "Is it Guru?" I can only say, speaking as a Guru, yes Abit of course it's Guru. Right then, the AA8XE is powered by the Intel 925XE chipset. Back in June 2004 Intel launched its new desktop line with the 915 and 925X chipsets. It offered great new technology, such as the PCI Express interface and that new sound concept called high definition integrated audio. The key feature of course was PCI Express with options in 16x and 1x lanes/busses, but also the introduction of something that I dislike to this very date, LGA775, the new Pentium 4 Socket for the Prescott core based CPU's. Despite my dislike of the Socket design I must confess its a strong new platform that can battle AMD's Athlon 64. A harsh battle as Intel's Prescott CPU's run rather hot and use up a lot of wattage compared to its competitor. The key primary feature you need to keep in mind is that this mainboard is capable of a 1066 MHz system bus. Your average Pentium 4 mainboard these days run on the quad pumped 800 MHz front side bus, this one can handle a bit more (266 MHz x4) making it a great option for all you 5 Pentium 4 Extreme Edition owners and then the rest of us, a guru'ish people called overclockers.

That being said, let's startup this review. The mainboard tested is the Intel 925XE chipset powered AA8XE armed with a Pentium 4 560 (3.6 GHz) processor and 1 GB OCZ DDR2 memory. Sporting an LGA 775 socket, 1066 MHz FSB, four DDR2 slots, DDR2-667 support, Matrix RAID, four PCI-Express slots and a heap of other features; this looks to be a great offering from a highly valued manufacturer.

ABit's AA8XE - See even Intel/Abit is warning you about LGA775, it's so vunerable.