Abit AV8 Motherboard

In late March and early April, 2005 I purchased the components of what what was (and still is) supposed to be my fastest, most powerful computer, a 64-bit Abit NF8-V mobo, 2G of PC2700 333Mhz DDR RAM, a pair of 7200RPM drives for a total of 0.45TB of storage, a couple of fast DVD-RAM drives, and an ATI Radeon graphics card. There are ten fans and the usual large heat sinks, plus neatly organized cabling to make sure everything stays nice and cool.

Like most AMD CPUs, this one can be overclocked rather easily. I've had it up to 2.33GHz with the RAM speed cranked up as well and it performed fine on all the benchmarks and burn in tests I ran. But even when I have it set to "safe" (read: as slow as it goes) defaults, the onboard Ethernet just doesn't work! I'm running MS Winblows XP Professional 64-bit Edition as the primary reason I built this system is to crunch numbers (one of my hobbies is number theory) and I wanted to write a lot of 64-bit x86 assembler and C/C code to do just that on this machine. Well, it is rather difficult to migrate all the development tools from my older systems to this new one without a network, and impossible to run a true distributed processing system using sneakernet.

I've emailed Abit several times. The replies were terse and uninformative at best. One guy sent me email back saying my motherboard didn't support 64-bit CPUs! (I may have typed in the wrong mobo name, perhaps that of one other Abit mobos I've used over the years such as the KT7A or NF7-S, but it should have been clear from all the other things I wrote that I had some sort of NF8 varient mobo. I know I mentioned that XP64 was installed and running on the system when I talked to Jeff at Abit on the phone. Now all they tell me via email is that they don't support Ethernet under Windows XP Pro 64-bit Edition and some crap like "our chipset manufacturers are working real hard to get some 64-bit network drivers certified). If they can't provide 64-bit hardware support for their board's own integrated peripherals, they should NOT blather about it being a 64-bit mainboard in the first place!

Abit's tech support (which I've never needed until recently) is pathetic. They have very limited phone support hours, none of which are on weekends or anytime when I can make free calls (weekends and 9pm to 6am weekdays) on my cell phone. I guess by being difficult to contact without running up a huge phone bill, they are saving on tech support costs at the expense of their customers.

The only good news is that there is a two year warranty and I am planning to send this junky board back to Abit and (probably) add my first 64-bit Asus motherboard to my collection. I expect a huge fuss from Abit when I try to return this thing... I've already signed up for their RMA service, but I imagine it will be a disservice.

The sad part of all this is that I have been a True Fan(tm) of Abit for years now, and like their 486 and Pentium class mobos a lot.