abit AW9D-Max Mainboard Review
What's in the BoxInside the package with the abit AW9D-Max you get the following items:
Features of the abit AW9D-Max abit uses the Intel 975X northbridge chipset in the AW9D-Max along with the Intel ICH7R Express southbridge. The board can handle FSB speeds of 1066 MHz and 800MHz. Supported CPUs include Core 2 as well as Pentium Extreme Edition, Pentium D and Pentium 4. The chipset also supports dual PCI Express graphics slots, HD audio and dual Gigabit LAN connectors. I do want to point out that not all mainboards using the Intel 975X chipset support Core 2, but the AW9D-Max does. You can tell from looking at the packaging that abit put time and money into the design. The box the abit AW9D-Max ships in is much larger than the typical mainboard boxes I am used to seeing.
Everything is packed well inside the box and all the cables and manuals are tucked into their own little boxes to keep it all safe and tidy. Open the top flap of the box, which is marked with all sorts of specs and info on the abit AW9D-Max and you can see through cutouts to get a look at the passive heat pipe cooling system and the HD Audio riser card.
The user manual abit includes is well written and thorough. abit also includes a quick start installation guide as well as a user manual for the Guru application. Another nice touch is a sticker that you can stick to the inside of your chassis with the important points of the mainboard listed. There is good reason that abit included seven SATA cables with this board, it has seven SATA ports that support RAID. Four of the SATA 3Gbps connectors are handled by the Intel ICH7R southbridge, and don’t need drivers installed to operate during OS install. That means no hitting F6 and going through that trouble to get your Windows system up and running.
One of my big pet peeves with SATA is the lack of locking cables, if you move your rig around you always run the chance of dislodging a SATA cable, abit uses a locking cable design with their board that prevents dislodging. If you are really into PCI cards, this may not be the board for you. There is only one PCI slot on the board and two PCI Express x1 slots. The slot arrangement places plenty of room between the PCI Express graphics slots for dual card arrangements and larger GPU cooling solutions like liquid. The little retainer pins are push button on this board rather than having to pull on them to release the cards.
The bad part about the board is that if you use CrossFire (even though an SLI bridge is included, SLI is not supported) you loose every one of the additional expansion slots. That means no X-Fi, PhysX or Killer NIC on this board with dual card set ups. I was really upset when I first got this board that I couldn’t run my X-Fi. However, the Audio MAX 7.1 audio riser card is a serious performer. The onboard Realtek HD uses the ALC882M HD codec and has connections for 5.1 and 7.1 analog as well as an SPDIF out for Dolby Digital. The onboard sound is Dolby Master Studio certified. I used to buy sound cards to get sound this good in game.
The passive cooling system for the chipset uses dual heat pipes and is called OTES 2 by abit. The system is low profile enough to accept most large aftermarket heatsink's. I also had no issues accepting the Thermaltake Bigwater 745 liquid cooling system I used for my CPU.
The rear IO panel abit designed for the AW9D-Max is a bit odd to look at; it has no legacy connectors meaning that there is no LPT connector for printers nor is there a serial connector. For most of us this will not be an issue, but if you still need these connectors you are out of luck. What you do see on the IO plate is a large cooling grate that is intended to help exhaust the heat from the northbridge passive heat sink inside the system. Also included on the rear panel are four USB 2.0 ports, dual Gigabit LAN ports, two PS2 connectors and one eSATA connector.
I have to wonder why abit choose to drop the LPT and serial ports and left the PS2 ports intact. I haven’t seen a gaming mouse or keyboard in years that didn’t use USB. I would have preferred more USB ports personally and three or four could have gone in the space the PS2 ports occupy. If you are not interested in the noise your rig puts out, you will be glad to hear that abit included seven fan headers, in addition to the CPU fan header. I used ever single one of them on my test system, and the PC sounds like a Cessna getting ready to takeoff. I am ok with that, my office is hot and I play lots of games on this rig, I wanted it cool not quiet. Rounding out the board features are four 240-pin DIMM sockets supporting up to 8GB of DDR2 RAM at 800/667 unbuffered and non-ECC. For those who like a little bling with their rig, abit positioned several blue LED lights around the board that glow when power is applied. There are also USB and FireWire headers on the board for front panel connections as well as a front panel audio header.
To make things easier for those who don’t use cases and the during build process, abit placed built in reset and power switches on the board along with two LEDs that read out error codes you can reference in the manual to troubleshoot system problems. These are some nice touches, for a long time I didn’t use a case for my test machine and it was a serious pain using jumpers to turn it on and off.
BIOS abit built the AWD9-Max from the ground up to be one of the best overclocking boards you can get your hands on. The BIOS has all overclocking settings in one place, so you don't have to flip back and forth through BIOS pages looking for all the settings. From within the BIOS you get a page called the Guru that has the settings for overclocking the CPU multiplier, FSB and RAM timings. You can even tweak voltages inside the BIOS with ease and when you are done you can save your tweaks to a custom BIOS preset. The presets allow you to have different profiles for different needs, which is a cool touch. Flip the mainboard over and you can see what abit calls OC Strips. These all copper strips are designed to spread heat away from key components and extract heat from the back of the mainboard.
Benchmarking the abit AW9D-Max Mainboard Test System The other components of my test system consisted of the following for this review:
Sandra 2007 I used several benchmarks from Sandra 2007 o get an idea of the performance the AWD9-Max is capable of. All tests were ran at stock settings on my X6800 and the only tweaks were to the RAM for a voltage of 2.20V and setting the memory frequency to 800MHz. CPU Arithmetic
Processor Multi-Media
AW9D-Max in Use The AW9D-Max is a well laid out mainboard. Even when you run dual graphics cards like the two slot X1900 CrossFire cards I am using, you can still use all of the SATA ports on the board that are located right behind and slightly below the rear of the graphics card. You can't say that on some boards, such as some of the more recent ASUS models. I did have a difficult time using the on-board headers for USB and Firewire because they were nearly under the graphics cards. Some of the fan headers were also difficult to reach with the cards in place as well. The single biggest issue I had with the abit AW9D-Max was the location of the reset jumper for the CMOS settings. When I placed my ATI branded X1900 XT in the second PCI slot with my X1900 CrossFire in the primary, the CMOS reset jumper fell directly under the small heatsink on the rear of my X1900 XT. This constitutes a pretty big issue for a board that is aimed directly at overclockers. I had to remove my second graphics card from the board to reset CMOS when I became too robust with my OC settings. Perhaps on systems running CrossFire cards from ATI's partners you wouldn't run into this issue though if they are based on the ATI reference design you likely will. Luckily abit makes the solution to this problem in a product called the Guru Panel that includes its own front panel mounted CMOS reset switch. The board was dead stabile no matter if it was running at stock levels or overclocked. With the exception of the CMOS jumper, USB and FireWire headers the other components were arranged well. The passive blocks on the chipset might interfere with some aftermarket heatsink/fan combos but cleared both my Zalman Fatal1ty fan and Thermaltake Bigwater 745 water block without issues. Verdict Despite the issues I had with the CMOS reset switch, USB headers and FireWire headers I still found the AW9D-Max to be one of the best mainboards I have used. I'll gladly give up some inconvenience on the build with non-essentials like difficulty reaching a few board headers, for ease of use with absolute essentials like the clear and easy availability of all the SATA ports on the board. Factor in the dead on stability of the AW9D-Max with the fantastic and easy to use overclocking facilities and abit has one of the best mainboards you will find for the Core 2 CPU. Pros
Cons
Test System Specifications:
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