Abit AN-M2 Motherboard Review

Introduction (Cont’d)

As you could see in Figure 1, this motherboard provides one x16 PCI Express slot for you to install a “real” video card in the future. It also has one x1 PCI Express slot and two regular PCI slots.

This motherboard has four SATA-300 ports and one ATA-133 port, all controlled by the chipset. The SATA ports support RAID 0, 1, 0+1 and 5. Here is another difference between NVIDIA and AMD chipsets: NVIDIA chipsets support RAID 5, while AMD chipsets don’t. On the other hand AMD chipsets support RAID 10, while NVIDIA chipsets support RAID 0+1, which is different: On RAID 0+1 if one of the hard drives fails, the system becomes a RAID 0 system (stripping). On RAID10, if one of the hard drives fails, the system becomes a RAID 1 system (mirroring).

It has 10 USB 2.0 ports (four soldered on the motherboard) and no FireWire ports.

It also has Gigabit Ethernet, controlled by the chipset and using a Marvell 88E1116 chip to make the physical layer interface.

On the audio section, this motherboard has eight channels provided by the chipset together with a Realtek ALC888 codec. The audio section of this motherboard is probably its best feature, because usually motherboards with on-board video use low-end codec, like Realtek ALC883, which provides a lousy 85 dB signal-to-noise ratio for its inputs. ALC888, on the other hand, provides fair specs for the average user, with a 90 dB signal-to-noise ratio for its inputs and a 97 dB signal-to-noise ratio for its outputs. The maximum sampling rate of its inputs is of 96 kHz, while its outputs supports up to 192 kHz. While these specs are enough for the average user, someone thinking of working professionally with analog audio editing and capturing should look for a motherboard with at least 95 dB SNR and 192 kHz sampling rate for its inputs.

This motherboard also provides full 7.1 analog audio jacks on its rear panel, feature not found on all motherboards with 7.1 audio around. So you can easily hook an analog 5.1 or 7.1 set of speakers to this motherboard. This motherboard also has one optical SPDIF out connector, another feature not easily found on motherboards with integrated video, making it easy for you to hook your PC to your home theater receiver with the best audio quality possible.

This motherboard has four DDR2-DIMM sockets, two black and two blue, accepting up to 8 GB of DDR2-400/667/800 memory. This is great, because several motherboards with on-board video have only two sockets, restricting your options for upgrading your memory in the future. With this motherboard if you want more memory you just have to buy two extra memory modules and install them on the empty sockets. We are saying “two” because socket AM2 processors support dual-channel feature and on this motherboard to enable this feature you simply need to install the modules on sockets with the same color.

The overall construction quality is top-notch. Abit used a passive heatsink on top of the MOSFET transistors from the voltage regulator circuitry (see Figure 4), which is great to ensure a longer life span for these components. Also all capacitors on this motherboard are Japanese, from Rubycon, including the capacitors from the audio section (several manufacturers use Japanese capacitors all around the board but on the audio section). This way you won’t face any capacitor leakage problem in the future. To make the quality of this motherboard even better Abit could have used ferrite coils instead of iron coils on the voltage regulator circuit, but that would be asking too much for a low-end motherboard.

Figure 4: Passive heatsink on top of the voltage regulator transistors.

In Figure 5, you can see everything that comes with the motherboard.

Figure 5: Motherboard accessories.

Before going to our performance tests, let’s recap the main features of the reviewed board.