The Board

The Fatality AN9 32x is shown above. The board is predominantly red however some of the larger components are black, overall it’s a nice looking board. There are no fans cooling the lower portion of the product, however there are two to the top left which we shall look at later. Looking first at the cooling we can see that Abit have included two rather large coolers.

Abit have long been advocates of removing the legacy connectors from their motherboards. This is a feature we applaud them for, there really isn’t any need to have a parallel or serial port on performance motherboards these days and the removal of these connectors opens up possibilities such as extra cooling.

The majority of the Fatality An9 32x is pretty standard with two 16x PCIe slots, 2 PCIe 1x slots and 6 SATA connectors. The usual power connectors are present with 1 12v 4-pin connector, the 24 pin PSU connector and the extra Molex for stability in dual card operation. There are two other points of note on this board, one good and one not so good. Let’s look at the one aspect of bad design and that’s the placement of the 6 SATA connectors.

For some reason Abit have chosen to place them directly in line with the first PCIE 16x slot. As this is a performance motherboard it is more than likely the case that any card used in this slot will be high end. Of course today’s high end cards are all very long and some feature large cooling solutions. The result is that the card overhangs the SATA ports rendering several of them unusable. Amazingly this design flaw is replicated in the USB connectors which are in line with the 2nd PCIe 16x slot.

One aspect of good design is the PCIe 16x slot clips. Abit have employed a slightly different design with them and it makes removal of cards much easier.

Finally before we take a look at the AN9 Bios we'd like to show you a little video of the board in action, it’s quite unique. And whilst the use of red LED's is initially worrying you soon come to the conclusion that it’s not a warning sign and is instead a design feature...