Review: Abit AN52 motherboard

There are currently three models in Abit's AN52 family, the one reviewed here being the most basic.

All use a combination of AMD's AM2 Socket and Nvidia's mainstream Nforce 520 chipset.

Built on a blue ATX PCB, at first glance the AN52 looks a bit sparse with more space around components than you normally see, but there's a very good reason for this - the Nforce 520 is a single-chip solution and where the Northbridge normally sits, there is just empty real estate.

This enables the components to be well spaced, so there's no chance of the locking latches on the four Dimm slots (up to a maximum of 8GB of DDR2 800 memory supported) interfering with any graphics card.

The 530 chipset provides 20 PCI Express lanes, which are used to provide a single x16 graphics slot and two x1 slots. Together with the three PCI slots, the AN52 offers a fair degree of expansion possibilities.

While the board looks basic, you still get integrated Gigabit Lan and eight-channel audio. In terms of storage connections, there is a single ATA/133 port along with four 3Gbits/sec Sata ports, which can be built into Raid 0/1/0+1/5 arrays thanks to the integrated Nvidia Mediashield technology.

The back I/0 panel is equally as sparse as the motherboard, with a large gap where the parallel and serial ports would normally sit. The rest of the panel is made up of the usual suspects - two PS/2 ports, four USB2 and six audio ports.

Despite the low cost of the board, the Bios offers a few tweaks to keep budding overclockers interested, with adjustments in FSB and PCI Express clocks, CPU multipliers and voltage adjustments for the CPU, memory and Hypertransport bus. It might lack a few frills, but the AN52 is a great board if you're building an AMD PC on a budget.

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