Motherboard Installation
In this section we take the abit AW9D-MAX and set it up in a standard, popular ATX case to see if any of the design decisions made by the abit engineers will affect the installation process or accessory usage.
Here I used a Cooler master Hyper 6+ heatsink, which is not a small heatsink by any means. When inserting RAM into the first DIMM slot, the Hyper 6+ cooler made it difficult to seat the RAM but this may only concern enthusiasts that use extremely large CPU coolers.
This case, like most modern cases today, comes with front USB and FireWire headers, as well as a front panel sound connection. The USB and Fire wire headers are well out of the way of other devices and make insertion relatively easy, even after most devices are installed. The front panel connector is placed on the bottom corner and is color coded making installation relatively easy as well.
After installing the video card, here a 7800gtx with a dual slot cooler, you can see that one of the PCI-E X1 slots is obstructed. However with the overall lack of PCI-E X1 products available on the market makes this is hardly a concern.
Here is the same setup with the all the power connections and data cables in place, which provides a perfect view for the potential issue of using a dual card setup. Even with the example of the single card you can see how the slots would quickly be obstructed even more with the addition of a second card.
