Conclusions and Final Thoughts
Performance
The performance of this board at stock settings was just as good as any board I have tested so far. Without a lower clocked Core 2 Duo available to me at the time of this review, I didn’t get a chance to really test out the FSB ceiling of this board. It did get the most out of the older Pentium D CPU that was used. The benchmark suite run shows that the AW9D-MAX is defiantly the performance leader of abit’s Intel camp.
BIOS Features
The AW9D-MAX features a very clean user friendly BIOS layout. The white on black background makes it very easy to pick out options. Most of the settings listed in the BIOS gives a short description to help guide you through the proper settings. The voltage and overclocking options lend to a wide range of overclocking possibilities. The total fan speed, system warnings, and shutdown control also helps to keep your system quiet, while removing some system failure risk by shutting down when a fan fails or set values are exceeded.
Board Features
For its price point this board does pack a fair amount of features in. One IDE ATA-100 port and Four SATA ports (RAID 0, 1, 0+1) on the Intel ICH7R controller, two SATA ports (RAID 0 and 1) on the primary Silicon Image controller, one SATA port and one e-SATA port (RAID 0 and 1) on the secondary Silicon Image controller, 8 USB 2.0 ports, 2 Realtek Gigabit Ethernet ports, Realtek 8-channel audio codec featuring an S/PDIF optical output port, 2-digit diagnostic LED display, onboard power and reset buttons and onboard blue leds with alternating flashing patterns configurable in the BIOS and the uGuru system software is perfect for those of us constantly changing system settings. It lets you perform some major fan and system tweaking right from windows.
Abit even thought to include an SLI bridge in case SLI is ever officially sanctioned by Nvidia on the Intel Chipset. Only thing missing is the kitchen sink in this package.
Pricing and Availability
As of this writing, the abit AW9D-MAX is widely available online and can be found for prices at just about $205.00 (Newegg has the AW9D-MAX for $209.00 at time of publishing). This places in the AW9D-MAX Pro in the category of being a feature rich and affordable enthusiast level 975X board.
Final Thoughts
I really liked the fast stock performance of this board. The sleek white and black look of this board is carried over from the PCB to the BIOS. The only place I could really find this board lacking was in the expansion department. One PCI slot does not leave open a large range of upgrade options. If you choose to run a dual card solution with dual slot GPU coolers you’re just about out of options altogether. Still the fact abit included just about every option available, including a daughter soundcard to help reduce onboard component interference, could still make this board a very desirable option to many system builders.
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