Review: Abit Fatal1ty F-190HD motherboard

A small yet feature-packed Radeon Xpress 1250 motherboard

Built on a Micro ATX format PCB, the F-190HD is the smallest member of Abit's Fatal1ty range of motherboards.

However, despite its size, and just like its larger brethren, it still manages to come packed with features including the all important HDMI support.

As in keeping with other members of the Fatal1ty motherboard clan, it's built on a red PCB and uses ATI's Radeon Xpress 1250/SB600 chipset combination to support Intel's Socket 775. Both chipsets are passively cooled, making it ideal for home theatre PCs, and uses solid state capacitors for better stability and longer life.

Another surprise considering its size is that manages to squeeze in a total of four Dimm slots, which will support to up to 16GB of 800/667/533MHz DDR2 memory.

Four Serial ATA 3GByte/sec ports are provided, and these can be used to build Raid 0, 1 or 0+1 arrays. The floppy drive slot on the board is awkward to get to, but since very few will actually make use of it this is only a minor criticism.

With the Xpress 1250 chipset providing integrated graphics, which will be more than adequate if you are building a HTPC, there is also x16 PCI Express slot should you want more graphics performance. The major plus for this board is the inclusion of the HDMI port which supports video up to 1080i.

As well as the integrated graphics, the F-190HD also has integrated Gigabit Ethernet and eight-channel HD audio including an S/PDIF optical out port. Alongside the graphics slot are two x1 PCI Express slots and a single standard PCI slot.

Finally, as in keeping with the rest of the range, the F-190HD has a fair amount of overclocking options in the Bios to get that little extra performance out of it. But even if you don't go down that route the F-190HD is a good stable board.