First Impressions

The first thing we noticed about the Fatal1ty AN9 was the neat carrying strap and deluxe array of goodies inside. All the usual users manual and driver discs were included, in addition to a neat SLI GPU cooling fan that hangs in between the respective PCI-Express slots allows for cool air to get sucked in through your case's side air vents. If you'd like to see these accessories be sure to check out our gallery page for the full scope and additional bonus pictures. Meanwhile we'll focus on the motherboard itself and its rather puzzling layout. Take a peek at the mobo below, you'll notice she's a real looker. Obviously a gamer mobo that costs a lot of moolah should look the part and the Fatal1ty AN9 doesn't disappoint. Couple this with some blood red LED's in a black case and you'll be king of the emo thug allstars. The problem though, is gamers still tend to use discrete sound card solutions such as the Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi. As nice as the riser sound card and the bundled software is, no one can touch Creative Labs' choke hold on the newest EAX technologies. This is a huge problem if you'd like to run SLI with the newest cards on the market since the secondary video card will either be extremely close to your sound card or be blocking the PCI slot altogether.

This motherboard has been out for some time now, but regardless it's Universal abit's flagship AM2 mobo and to overlook something so glaringly obvious is inexcusable. Now if you're the type of person that doesn't care about sound as long as you can hear it, you're all good. But if there's still one PCI device a lot of gamers use it's a sound card, and we can only assume Uabit was crossing its fingers with the sound card solution they packaged with this mobo and hoping gamers would be content...well we're not. On the flip side, most of the jumpers on the board are long enough for those of us with cramped cases such as the Antec Solo to be easily removed and re-inserted, so kudos to Uabit for making it easy to reset the CMOS. The rest of the layout is is OK, but still shows some strange board choices. The SATA ports thankfully don't interfere with long graphics cards and if you wish to replace the existing chipset cooling solution with, say a Thermalright HR-05, then you should have just about enough clearance to sail right on through. At this point you might be waving your hand in a rabid manner with froth spewing about as you cry out "what about the craptastic floppy connector location?!??!" Answer is: "WHO CARES." Honestly, you'll probably only use your floppy once, and that would be to install RAID drivers. The digital POST code display by the SATA ports is a nice feature if you've got troubleshooting issues, but it's the 21st century and we're tired of deciphering stupid post codes. Why not include a sexy female voice pumped out of a tinny onboard speaker saying "CPU failure, you naughty boy."

One can dream. Till then we can focus on the OTES GT system on the Fatal1ty AN9. This is just marketing speak for chipset cooling system. See that silver heatpipe crawling along towards the back of the mobo? Also noticed how the second heatsink isn't actually connected? We did too and we pondered as to why Uabit didn't just make it one huge package. Upright coolers blowing air directly towards the rear of the case have taken off like hotcakes over the years, and coolers such as the Zalman CNPS9500 AM2 won't be able to dissipate heat from the PWM and chipset area as good as the stock cooler due to the design. Oh well, at least they included nice and quiet loud as all hell cooling fans to exhaust the built-up heat. Seriously, we know gamers like to frequent noisy, dirty, poorly run LAN tournaments but at the very least try to keep their jetpack fans and lucky plush animal at home. Uabit's Fatal1ty AN9 makes this impossible, but that isn't the biggest gripe. I believe a motherboard should have as many USB ports as humanly possible on the actual motherboard. No one likes to mess around with stupid extenders that just clutter up the case even more. Four USB 2.0 slots is pretty weak, and it's understandable some users may still have all those slots left if they use the legacy PS/2 ports but that doesn't negate the fact that it's lame to have to install additional ports yourself and that there is no built-in Firewire connector. I never understood the need for dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, but rest assured those are included. If you're having a tough time remembering which port is which a quick tip is to right click the actual connections within Windows and rename them to something more appropriate like "top jack" and "lower jack" so you don't have to remember where to plug in your Cat-5.

On the far end are the 4 DIMM slots that run parallel to both the 24-pin ATX power connector and lone IDE channel. Now this area might look a little cramped, but the Zalman CNPS9500 AM2 CPU did manage to barely (read: scrape alongside) fit next to the system RAM. The nice thing about using said CPU cooler is that it accentuates the 'blowing hot air out the case' effect that the OTES GT system is attempting to pull off. If you're overclocking like we were, you are going to want to leave the scrawny little fans plugged in, but when we ran stocks settings we unplugged these little suckers and noticed the immediate drop in noise levels - so heads up if you've got dainty little ears. A few years back, Uabit was involved in a mess with bad capacitors that caused motherboard failure. Since then they've made sure to use Japanese only caps which have a much higher level of quality. Stuff like this is crucial in an overclocking board such as this one. In general, the motherboard has a less than satisfactory layout due to the wonky PCI device placement and other little details that add up like the PCI-Express locks being on the wrong side of the slot (but a must due to the dumb chipset cooling solution) making it a pain to remove a video card unless you've taken most other stuff out of the way.

The bottom end of the motherboard houses the internal USB and Texas Instruments based Firewire header pins for those of us who have some type of front panel connectors.One thing you can't see here is the rave-like red LED lights that line the back of the motherboard. If you install the included software from Uabit you can actually select a lighting pattern or whether you want the LED's on or off completely. Thank you Uabit for including this option as it makes sense to give users a choice unlike the Razer Tarantula keyboard we reviewed a few weeks back. Overall not too bad right? Maybe you don't really want an SLI board and you're more of an overclocking junky that craves endless BIOS options? Then click next 'cause you're gonna like what you see.