ABIT AA8XE Motherboard Review (Intel 925XE)

Guru3D - Abit is making really impressive mainboards lately. Especially their somewhat expensive Fatality line catched the ‘3rd eye’. But what about their regular mainboards? Perhaps forget about paying 60 bucks more for the Fatality tag and an additional two fans. Do we still get that lovely tweakability and performance? Today Guru3D will test one of Intel platform based mainboards, armed with an orange PCB and stacked with a lot of extra features we are taking a look at the AA8XE which of course is based on Intel’s 925XE mainboard chipset.

Sound is something really nice on this mainboard, Integrated High-Definition sound. Intel designed this to integrate quality sound in Intel desktop platforms to meet the demands required of a modern PC in the home and office or even your HTPC (Home Theater PC). The previous AC’97 solution was capable of delivering a maximum of Six Channels of Audio at 48KHz/20-bit Audio quality, the Intel HD specification manages 8 channels at 192KHz 32-bit. With this solution Intel can support all modern Dolby formats like Dolby Digital EX and even DTS ES. Even better is the wide array of connectivity for sound, there even are optical SPDIF in and outputs available. Fantastic, especially when you are using this in a HTPC environment.