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The Verdict
I must say that I'm pretty impressed with this mainboard. Whether you are an office user that needs maximum performance or a hardcore gamer that likes to tweak his system to the max really doesn't matter. The AA8XE offers pretty much all of it.
The mainboard runs absolutely beautiful and stable and is simply packed with very nice features. This actually was the first time we became acquainted with the uGuru suite and that total toolset is simply beautiful. The diversity in monitoring, overclocking and tweaking is something you'll hardly find on any other mainboard. So that's a huge plus to me. The more average PC consumer will not understand and use these uGuru options though as it's for a very slim yet reputable piece of the market. At default the BIOS is setup right though, out of the box you'll get really good performence offered to you.
Gaming wise, well... Intel still has a difficult time battling AMD's Athlon 64 price and performance in that area. But let's not forget that Intel offers these small things we take for granted so easily, Hyper-Threading for your multitasking intensive applications for example. Overall we could state that AMD is a tiny bit better for the gamers though, yet don't fool yourself as I doubt you would actually notice that with the naked eye. Pentium systems, although not heavily demonstrated in our tests due to time constraints simply rock when it comes to real world applications in the form of encoding media-streams etc etc. But then again, does it matter to you that an MP3 is encoded a couple of seconds slower/faster? MPEG2/4 encoding, that's where the Pentium 4 platforms will take the lead more clearly though.
So let sum things up, in retrospect. We "the media" tend to look only at the newest features and gadgets but let's not forget that this chipset is loaded with fantastic features like DDR2, RAID, 1 Gigabit LAN, 8-channel sound in 192 kHz/32-bit quality, Matrix RAID, 4 native SATA 150 channels, PCI-Express. The mainboard itself was as expected, easy to install, very stable (we did not experience even one little freeze) and nice performance. It has some serious overclocking and tweaking options at BIOS level and also at software level, with the help of uGuru software/hardware features. 
All in all it simply is an awesome and very diverse platform to own and play with. Since DDR2 prices finally are "about" as expensive as standard DDR memory and if you decide to go for a Pentium 4 LGA775 Socket based processor I can highly recommend this mainboard. The mainboard (this is the basic version) is selling for a good price also.
Excellent feature set, even better stability and good performance are the keywords here. I can only imaging what would have happened if I applied my little Asetek LGA775 watercooling kit on the chipset Northbridge and CPU. Hmm, we might update this article in the future ;)
Editor's choice!
ABIT AA8XEProduct type: Mainboard
Manufacturer: ABit
Info: http://www.abit.com.tw
