Overclocking and Stress Testing

Overclocking

Being added back into our reviews is the overclocking segment. As always, the users overclocking experience will vary greatly depending upon components used. We recommend strong caution when overclocking, because it can significantly degrade the life expectancy of the system. Memory voltage is at 2.0v and CPU vcore is left at default. Stability is tested by running one instance of Prime 95 on each CPU core while looping 3DMark for a twelve hour period.

abit AW9D-MAX Intel 975X Motherboard Review - Motherboards 86

The max FSB I could achieve with the abit AW9D-MAX was 274 MHz which equaled the AB9 Pro. Keep in mind this is using the older Pentium D without dropping the CPU multiplier or raising the CPU vcore, so the near identical results were expected since the CPU is the limiting factor here. One area of concern though is the passively cooled chipset of the AW9D-MAX. If you going to be performing some heavy overclocking, a well ventilated case or good airflow is still recommended.

Stress Test — Putting It All Together

Another test we added to the motherboard suite this time around was the stress test.  In this we take all the on-board components and make them all work together just to see if they play nicely. 

In our case here this meant running WMP10 on an HD video, having PCMark05 run some hard drive tests, running HDTach on the external USB hard drive, playing a large WAV file and running the network bandwidth test, all at the same time.  The tests were looped for an hour and we listened for sound ‘jumps’ or video stutters or anything similar.

abit AW9D-MAX Intel 975X Motherboard Review - Motherboards 87

The abit AW9D-MAX Deluxe motherboard passed our stability tests without an issue running Ethernet, USB, graphics and hard drive tests all at the same time without slowdown and without crashing. The only area of concern raised here, is that power module one listed in the uGuru temp monitoring software would hit the 80 degrees Celsius warning temperature. The other three power modules would stay well within tolerances. This led me to believe that the thermal contact between the first power module and the heatsink was missing or loose. This does not appear to be a consistent design flaw of the board.

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