Abit AA8 (Intel 925X Alderwood)
Expansion options
At expansion options, Abit AA8 does not produce impression of a high-end product. For example, additional RAID controllers are completely missing. Instead, the company engineers decided to confine with the ICH6R features.
As a result, the board supports four SerialATA channels which allow setting up two RAID arrays of levels 0,1 or MatrixRAID.
While the number of SerialATA ports in ICH6 was increased, the number of USB2.0 ports remained the same - 8, as before. Four ports of them are on the rear panel, with 4 more plugged in via headers (the board comes bundled with 1 header for 2 ports).
Besides, Abit AA8 supports for the other type of serial bus - the IEEE1394 ("Firewire"). For that, there is another Texas Instruments' TSB43AB23 controller onboard.
Therefore, the board offers support for up to 3 IEEE1394 ports: one positioned on the rear panel, with the other two plugged in via a header (the same as for USB ports). The connectors are marked red (with those for USB are marked blue).
Then, the Abit AA8 board has 8-channel Intel High Definition Audio, with the ALC880 chip is used as the codec.
A couple of words on the overclocking: the board offers a high-speed Realtek RLT8110S (Gigabit Ethernet) LAN controller.
Now take a look at the board's rear panel.
We have a standard set of connector: PS/2 ports for the keyboard and mouse, one parallel and one serial ports, audio inputs for the 8-channel acoustics, SP-DIF input and output, four USB2.0 ports, one Firewire and one network port (RJ-45).
Traditionally, a jumpers layout diagram:
There are three jumpers onboard the Abit AA8: the CCMOS1 is used for clearing the CMOS (near the south bridge), the USB_PWR1 and USB_PWR2 - for waking up the system on pulses from USB devices. All the jumpers have plastic tails to make the installation more amenable.
Note that the boards offers a 7-stage POST indicator to display initialization codes upon the system boot-up. All the other additional features are gathered in the additional mGuru chip which is installed near the BIOS chip.
Now on to the BIOS settings.
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