ABIT has done a wonderful job with the Fatal1ty AN9 32X board. The board scored over 40 points on our features scoring system, with SLI, Firewire and other features making it one of the most feature-rich boards on the market. Performance was on a par with other boards on this chipset with the default clock speed, but the overclocking was very good on the board making it an excellent choice for people that want the absolute best.
NVIDIA's nForce 590 SLI chipset is the cream of the crop for their lineup. One of the main concerns on motherboard choices today is whether you want SLI or Crossfire, as a SLI board doesn't support Crossfire video cards and vice versa. Once you make that determination as to which way to go, the Fatal1ty board is an excellent choice for an SLI system.
With the announced merger of AMD and ATI nearing completion, it will be interesting to see how NVIDIA reacts to their main competition being a part of their biggest partners in the past. Will it lead to NVIDIA abandoning the AMD platform or lessening their presence in that market? Will NVIDIA cooperate more with Intel driving the Core2 CPUs towards a broader market? Only time will tell.
