ABIT Fatal1ty FP-IN9-SLI board details continued



A small black heatsink with the name 'Fatal1ty' written over it covers the board's Southbridge. More to the bottom of the board we find the CMOS battery and the board's BIOS EEPROM stuck inside a small socket making it replaceable if anything goes wrong. At the bottom's right side Abit equipped the board with power-on and reset buttons which makes it easier to test power on your system when build outside a case.



The NVIDIA 650i SLI chipset uses the NF-430 chip for its Southbridge. This name might sound familiar to you as it has been used quite some in the past; even some nForce 4 mainboards came with this Southbridge. The latest update of this chip is called the A3 revision. Between the chip and its heatsink we found traditional white goop, though it was not evenly spread out and some parts of the chip weren't even covered with thermal paste. If you're about to change the thermal pad used on the Northbridge you might as well put the Southbridge on your to-do list too.



More to the left we find a Winbond W83627DHG chip. This x86 compatible I/O controller supports hardware monitoring with thermal, voltage and fan management. Winbond SMARTFAN technology supports “Program and Forget” protocol without CPU overhead. Other advanced features include parallel or serial flash memory interface for BIOS and ACPI for power management which makes this chip of the most advanced in its series.

The smaller chip found close to Winbond I/O controller caries the name Realtek ALC888. This High Definition Audio Codec comes with EAX/Direct Sound 3D/I3DL2/A3D compatibility, and excellent software utilities like Karaoke mode, environment emulation, software equalizer, HRTF 3D positional audio, and optional Dolby® Digital Live, DTS® CONNECT™, and Dolby® Home Theater programs, theirfore the ALC888 series provides an excellent home entertainment package and game experience for PC users.



Double PCIe VGA slots are available by using the Abit SLI Switch Card in SLI mode. This switch card will split the single 16x PCI lanes from the master VGA PCIe slot into double 8x PCIe lanes; this means each card will have a 8x PCIe connection with the MCP.



Rear I/O Panel connectivity is kept rather low, besides the usual PS/2 mouse/keyboard ports we can also find 4 USB 2.0 ports, a gigabit LAN port, 7.1 audio ports and a SPDIF Out port. With serial and parallel hardware almost being a thing of the past, it still might be useful to add those ports for a small amount of people, parallel connected older printers for example are still very common in the average family. The Gigabit LAN port makes use of NVIDIA's FirstPacket technology, by setting the game's network traffic as priority 1 this feature will give you the lowest ping times and the best online game experience available.