Abit NI8 SLI: nVidia SLI for the Intel Gamer

ABIT NI8 SLI: Feature Set (Cont'd)

One of the highlights of this board is the "Silent OTES" cooling solution for the C19 Northbridge. It is an ABIT engineered heatpipe technology. Heat generated by the chipset is noiselessly conducted to the back panel radiator. It does its job very well, but because of the "egg frying heat" generated by the C19 Northbridge, you will definitely want to make sure that you have adequate airflow inside your case. The ABIT uses a non-adjustable 1.4V to its Northbridge, and it is a puzzle that Abit didn't provide the option to go higher. Though the Silent OTES does an admirable job, it is overwhelmed by the considerable heat generated. The OTES concept itself appears to be a good idea, but in this application, an active addition to the party providing some airflow would be welcomed.

ABIT has also included a Post Code debug LED, which can be very useful when trying to diagnose your system out of a problem situation, such as a no boot. An add-in debug card has been part of my test setup for many years and it has been useful in many difficult troubleshooting situations to be able to track and correct a post malfunction.

Continuing ABIT's practice concerning its build quality, including the highest quality Nichicon capacitors in the CPU power section lends itself to unrivaled stability in CPU voltage. No notable fluctuations were observed even when the system was being stressed heavily. The Power section is the now familiar 4 Phase design, and they have included a heatsink to assist in cooling the MOSFETS. In this arrangement of MOSFET heatsink and Silent OTES "radiator", air moving from the CPU heatsink/fan assists in providing some airflow across both. This seems to be adequate, but in my experience with this iteration of Silent OTES, it does become overwhelmed by the heat from the C19 northbridge Anyone purchasing this board should add some supplemental active cooling to prevent long term heat-induced problems.

The I/O panel contains the usual cast of characters including 4 USB 2.0 ports and the Gigabit LAN port. This also provides another view of the Silent OTES radiator.

There have been many methods implemented by manufacturers since the introduction of the SLI chipset in facilitating the switch, which changes video modes from normal to SLI. ABIT has chosen to utilize a small card, which is held in by spring clips. You merely release it, flip it over and reinstall it. In the photo above, it is in "normal" single card mode.

In this photo, the board is switched to dual card "SLI" mode.

This is ABIT's audio solution for the NI8 SLI, the AudioMAX 7.1. By design, it locates the audio chip and associated electronics on the separate PCB to "reduce the amount of noise created by high frequency generated on the mainboard." This installs in a dedicated audio slot next to the LAN/USB port that looks like a backwards PCIe x1 slot. The card includes an S/PDIF out along with S/PDIF/Line in, and all connections necessary to provide 7.1 sound. It relies on the Realtek ALC850 chip and the AC'97 7.1 channel codec. Note that this is not an HD Azalia audio solution, and this will be a concern for some users. However, we have encountered some HD Audio implementations that sound worse than AC'97, so we believe the quality of the solution is really the most important factor.

Finally, the hardware package includes 6 SATA cables, floppy and IDE cables along with the SLI bridge connector. ABIT also includes an SLI bracket shown at the bottom right, which is used to support the SLI bridge connector and the 2 SLI graphics cards.