ABIT Fatal1ty FP-IN9-SLI board details



The CPU's operating voltage is supplied through the LGA 775 socket, the 4 phase PWM circuit is found just near the CPU socket. Passive cooling is provided by a small black heatsink which covers the power mosfets, we didn't notice overheating issues here. Keep in mind that our Zalman 9700LED CPU Cooler did create some airflow over this heatsink just like the stock Intel Cooler is set up to do.



With the launch of the Pentium 4 cpu mainboards needed an extra 12V connector to provide the cpu with enough stable voltage. This so called P4 connector has been used on multiple other platforms from then on, it evolved into an 8-pins power connector so that less power has to flow through each wire, or more power can be used without the wires heating up. The extra molex connector is useful for the overclockers out there, though I must say that it didn't provide more stability through our overclocking sessions.



4 DIMM slots can take 32Gb DDR2 up to 800MHz in Dual Channel. This is just in theory; we didn't found any problems running our DRAM modules beyond 800MHz in unlinked mode. This board also includes SLI ready memory support. If your RAM is SLI ready then the BIOS will auto-tweak the DRAM latencies for higher performance without harming the memory modules or making the system unstable. At the top of our picture we can see that CPU and chipset fan header, on the other side of the DIMM slots we find the DRAM PWM circuit with on its left side the 24-pin ATX connector.



The heart of the FP-IN9 SLI is found beneath a big black heatsink, again passive cooling is all that is needed to prevent the board from overheating. During our tests this heatsink felt very warm, burning your fingers is likely to happen if you touch the heatsink's fins after some hours of intensive testing/benchmarking. Overclockers should definitely try to mount a fan on top of this heatsink.



A brown thermal pad is used to help transfer heat from the MCP to the heatsink. It may not be the best performing thermal pad out there, though it does what it is supposed to do so we can't complain either. For that slight edge during OC sessions, you might want to switch this thermal pad with AS5 or any other kind of high quality thermal grease.



In contrary to its heatsink the MCP itself is rather small. The heatsink has a foam cut-out at the bottom to prevent the MCP's core to be crunched during mounting ->

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