Reviews for ABIT NI8SLI Desktop Motherboard - nVIDIA - Socket T LGA-775 - 1

Abit NI8 Sli - decent value motherboard

Strengths: Onboard sound, ethernet with NVidia firewall, SATA RAID, supports SLI video, price!

Weakness: Only 2 PCI slots, no onboard firewire, no support for Pentium D 9xx series

Bought this motherboard on sale without deep research with intention to use Pentium D 920 and was a bit frustrated that 9xx series is not supported by BIOS, and ABIT is not promising such support in the future. So I ended up with this motherboard and budget Pentium D 805 (Supposedly good for overclocking but I haven't done any overclocking so far). In general I am satisfied with this combination
NI8 + Pentium D 805, except one thing - had to add additional firewire card wich uses one of two PCI expansion slots.... well saved some $$ though :)

Edit:
Now have this combo running at 3.2GHz with no problems.
Couldn't make it 3.8GHz because my memory does not go so fast....should have buy faster. Other then that - !!!!

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Reply by member: zoglog
May 25, 2006

You really should read this article on OCing your 805.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/05/10/dual_41_ghz_cores/

With air cooling you can hit 3.8GHz! With your processor you basically can rival the high 9xxD processors at a fraction of the cost. Just make sure to buy a good cooling fan.

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Has all the features I needed

Strengths: has 2 PCI express slots and up to 4GB RAM

Weakness: Only 2 PCI slots

I got this motherboard when it was on sale. It was a great price and this motherboard is the best one I ever had. It supported my Pentium D 3.0Ghz and 2 GB ram. It supports Dual channel Ram so that's useful. It even has 1000Mbs Ethernet port. The main problem is that there are only 2 PCI slots on this.

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Great SLI motherboard, Lots of OC options, Runs very...

Strengths: FSB can be overclocked independently from RAM and PCIx. Nice LED feature for debugging. Seperate sound card adapter.

Weakness: Only 2 PCI slots. Northbridge runs very Hot. No serial, parallel and Firewire ports. IDE and dloppy connectors are at odd position.

This is a great SLI motherboard for budget price. Installing was a breeze. Overcloked my CPU without any problem. There are few problems with the board - IDE and FDD connector are at very hard to reach position once the board is installed. The northbridge has its own cooler and runs very hot. This board can take upto 8 GB of Dual channel DRR2 memory. Board has very nice looking read LEDs around it - for some it can be annoying. The biggest drawback for the board is it doe snot have firrewire ports and only 2 PCI slots. Overall I am happy with the board looking at what I paid.

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N18 SLI

Strengths: Like red "LED's", there all over this board. Gigabit lan, SATA raid "0" or "1" or "0+1" or "JABOD", Lots more good things to say, but, I can't fit it all in this. "200 caricter limit" :-)

Weakness: Northbridge heat sink runs hot, REALY HOT. "186F stock". Over clocked, expect 220F, then, camp fire. Bios will make a newbees head spin right off there sholders, (Newbees beware)

Most seam to compare motherboards nowadays to there overclocking capabilities. Over clocking is always a bad idea. If you want to "short life the parts" then overclocking is just rite for you. If you want it to "fly" get faster parts. This board goes really good with some really fast CPUs. If you don't mess with it to much, It will work great. However the builders have included software that can self destruct anything on the market. I would suggest, if you must, install the over-clocking software, play with it, see what it does, then, if everything still works after testing. Un install the softwar, and forget you ever had it. If used, at best, it only will shorten the life of your parts. At worst it will end there life.

The on-board SATA raid screams, but is a bit hard to find in the bios. (Note to Bios builders: "what where you thinking", this bios setting should be on the top level or, a clear second level, not buried deep where nowone looks). Defalt bios "ALMOST" works, but really needs to be set up by someone that knows what there doing. Defalt "high temp limit" almost works with the north bridge. Another problem in the defalt bios settings is the boot sequence. A, C, then "CD drive". This will keep any CD OS boot disk from ever working. Someone Reilly screwed up on that one!!! That will mess up any newbee on the block. :-) Another simple glitch, the CPU fan must be plugged in to the board power. There are many three prong fan spots but it needs to be in the one marked (cpu-fan1) or the defalt bios setting will cut the power supply. If no fan is detected in this spot the auto shutdown kills the power. So you can't use a fan that plugs directly into the power supplie. Keep this in mind when you are looking at those new CPU heat sinks. And forget a cool "sonic tower" it can't be run on this board. No fan = no power to board, it shuts off in about 5 seconds. Also the raid drivers are only on a 3.5" disk, so you need to install a 3.5" drive to get the raid going. (note to bios builders: some modern boxes don't even have a hole anymore for these drives. Why can't you dummies incloud a CD with this on it? Or better yet place them on the same disk you do send out with the self destructing overclocking software).
On another review of this board someone said the IDE plugs where in a bad spot. Give me a break, how many times do you need to deal with them. :-) To those that have not tried an SATA hard drive. It's really worth the couple extra bucks and if you decide to get a second hard drive, a "raid 1" will save a ton of grief on any backup cost.

Things to Consider: a box with a lot of fan spots, then fill all of them. This puppies a real toaster, don't try to save money on cooling. I thermal-glued another CPU heatsink rite on top of the stock northbridge "heat pipe heatsink" and aimed a fan at it. Got it down to 160F. (with stock CPU clocking) Still, a bit towsty, but I think it will be OK.

Benchmark speed as is, setup with "Intel P4-D 830" and a gig of ram, OS: win. server 2003 ent., Using optimized "Boinc" this makes us of the on chip SSE3 support. - Measured floating point speed of 3,378.69 million ops/sec, and Measured integer speed of 11,415.69 million ops/sec. Not bad at all, infact it's faster that most others I have tried by about 15 or 20%. With the same set up, and yet it's still dirt cheep. Over all, this board compares to one that would cost four or more times as much with the same extras found on a similar good server board.

Hope this helps, David B.

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Good choice for upgrader

Strengths: 1.LED for debugging is specially good. 2.Unique u-Guru Technology. 3.Such a price for this kind of card:)

Weakness: Only 2 PCI slots is a problem. No firewire.

As a budget price, I thought this card is really worthy for upgraders. Abit motherboard have a excellent ability in overclocking (maybe you need a big fan!), but in this aspect N18SLI is somewhat weak. Another point is that the all passive cooling solution, which means absolute silence.
Admittedly, the board has its drawback as I mentioned above: no firrewire and only 2 PCI slots. You also need to pay attention to northbridge which will get toasty under full load. Overall, it is a good board. Don't be fussy.

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Good Budget SLI Board

Strengths: Independent OC for CPU, RAM uGuru Silent-OTES Cooling Technology High speed SATA (3GB/S)

Weakness: Missing a few features Not so cool Silent-OTES Cooling Technology

This is a good budget SLI board, although I did not have two video cards to test the performance. I used a OC'd X800GTO and it works very well. CPU D805 is oc'd to 3G with good stability. Northbridge gets real hot and the cooling system does not seem to work well. I really have to use 2 large case fans(In/Out) to keep the board cool. The gigabit enthernet makes my pc to pc transfer goes quickly for huge files through a gigabit switch.

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Abit NI8 SLI Motherboard

Strengths: Price, enough flexibility to over-clock CPU. Motherboard lights up with LEDs all-around MB

Weakness: Had to take a dremel to gain access to one of mounting hole.

The combo D805 cpu + motherboard was just right. I have this overclocked to 3.6 GHz with stock fan. Have a Zalman cooler on order. Cheap way to get a hi-powered machine for games or otherwise. Some patience is required to get everything tweaked and working. Would do this again.

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Niceee

Strengths: Low cost, feature packed, 6 sata

Weakness: only 2 normal pci slots, no firewire

Great motherboard. I purchased it on the fly since it was on sale for cheap. When I received it I saw tons of features that I didn't expect, such as 6 SATA connections in addition to the 2 pata and floppy connector. 7.1 sound for those who don't want to pay for an x-fi, and lights for the flashy computer builders. Saw all the features plus overclocking capabilities so now I can't decide whether to keep this rig or my xps600.
Downside is that it has only 2 pci, thats not enough these days since there's so much tech out there that you can upgrade your comp with.

I'd recommend this over any if you can get it around $50 like a lot of us did.

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Solid Motherboard for a great price - poor OC'ing

Strengths: SLI support Does everything it supposed to do Diagnostic LEDS

Weakness: Overclocking is lacking 2 PCI slots

This motherboard is stable as long as your not overclocking it. I had a hard time getting this board to OC at all, and even when i did it crashed a few times (random). If your going to use it for STOCK CPU and Memory settings you can't go wrong for the price (w/ SLI support)... but other then that I'd steer clear if you plan on OC'ing at all.

Although the Diagnostic LED's came in handy it's poor OC-ablility turned me off.

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NI8 SLI Motherboard (Pentium 4/Pentium D/Pentium...

Strengths: Sli, FanEQ makes my case fans very quiet, Highend chipset, very affordable

Weakness: only two pci slots, floppy and auxiliary 12v power connector are in awkward position at the bottom, Support of Pentium D processors is limited, no firewire, no printer port, no front audio headers

I was looking for a cheap board so i could take the SLI plunge. I then stumbled upon this board and since it was on sale, i thought I'd take a chance. I'm impressed by how quiet it makes my case fans with the FanEQ enabled. Although, the manual says i must disable this feature if using SLI mode, which i haven't gotten a chance to do yet. The floppy and auxiliary connection for the video card is located at an awkward position at the very bottom and might pose a problem when installing cards in the last PCI slot. All in all, this board is very good with a wide range of features. I added some OCZ paste to my cpu, the stock heatsink noise is non existant and it runs alot cooler. The red glow of the board adds a nice feature to window cases. If your looking to make the jump into SLI without breaking the bank, I'd recommend this board.

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Very good , very reliable

Strengths: very reliable; easy to use and install.

Weakness: working temprature a little high

Got this one for about $50 and like it so much. It works very reliable although the working tempreature is a liitle bit high. The drawback is that it only has two pci slots. definitely not enough for some hardware fun like me. Overall , It is a good mot

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Slick SLI Motherboard!

Strengths: Tons of options at a low price.

Weakness: I'm not much for the LED's.

This is my second Abit motherboard and I must say I am impressed by their quality. Before I would only buy MSI. Now I have decided to try other brands due to customer service concerns. This motherboard does exactly what it says it should and I have no complaints.

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NI8 SLI Motherboard

Strengths: Good price with many features

This motherboard got some really nice features and the price is good. This motherboard and the Intel Pentium® D Processor 805 is a great combination. Setup is easy with the manual.

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SLI motherboard

Strengths: There is no north bridge fan so it's quiet. The price is very affordable.

Weakness: It doen't support Pentium-D 820 and 920, if you install one it will be treated as a single core CPU. Although on Nvidia website says this chipset doesnt support Pentium D 9xx CPUs, it works prefectly with my Pentium D 930. Also how hard is it to includ

Its a good motherboard to O/C the pentium D 805 but this motherboard only has 2 PCI slots.
The good thing is that it supports Dual core channel and you can also put 2 video cards on it. Also the set up is easy.

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ABIT NI8 SLI Motherboard

Strengths: SLI support for 2 video cards

Weakness: only 2 PCI slots

it is very stable for cpu overclocking and has nice set-up menu for overclocking. It comes with PCI-express 7.1 sound card which I never expected. I never had any problems to set up 2 nvidia 6600 video cards and it runs great. Next time, I want to upgrade to SATA drvies.

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ABIT NI8

Strengths: Supports SLI, a lot of "eye candy" i.e. red LEDs and red board. Allows quite a bit of tweaking in the BIOs. The primary reason I got this board was the price, after the rebate, I felt guilty!!!

Weakness: THIS BOARD IS NOT FOR FIRST TIME BUILDERS!!! One mistake in the BIOs and you are dead in the water. Yes, I'd say this board is a challenge to set up. Only 2 PCI slots.

My definition of "set up" used in the above paragraph is a system that is low maintience and reliable 24/7. In my opinion unless you like to tweak your system often, this board is not for you!!!

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