ABIT AW9D-MAX
ABIT AW9D-MAX Motherboard
It’s been a while since Intel has come up with an overclocking champ. Lately, there has been a lot of excitement with Intels’ newly released CONROE processors. Quite a few have said that it is the next overclocking gem from Intel. Some said it could reach FSBs never before reached. Well, that could only be good news for both enthusiasts and overclockers alike.
With that in mind, we all know that the key to a processor’s overclocking success relies heavily on the motherboard. A great chip is useless if your “mobo” doesn’t have the “mojo”. An overclocking processor needs a motherboard that can go the limits. Today we are testing a board from ABIT that promises just that. Everybody knows that the ABIT name is synonymous to overclocking. If there’s any board that can reach dizzying FSB speeds, ABIT is a very good bet. Or is it?
Today at OCTools, we will find out if ABIT still has the goods to deliver a board that can keep up with the new overclocking gem from Intel, the Conroe. So without further ado, we introduce to you ABIT’s Intel 975X motherboard offering, the AW9D-MAX.
The AW9D-MAX is based on Intel’s i975X/ ICH7R chipset. It supports all LGA775 processors including the latest generation Core 2 chips. It has dual DDR2 support and dual PCI-Express X16 slots intended for ATI CrossFire cards. Some of the features include SATA RAID, e-SATA, dual PCI-E Gigabit LAN, Firewire, and 7.1 CH audio. It also boasts a multitude of 100% Japanese made solid state capacitors and special PWM layout to ensure an ample and clean current to the power-hungry dual-core and multi-GPU systems of today. Unique abit engineered technologies, such as Silent OTES™ 2 and µGuru™ keep your components healthy while providing total system monitoring and control. The µGuru™ technology puts advanced BIOS-level features like overclocking and fan-control right at the fingertips of the user, making it an easy task to fine-tune your system for the perfect balance between performance and noise.
AW9D-MAX Layout
The board is packaged in a carry box designed with a Japanese warrior holding a Samurai blade and some Japanese characters. I presume it stands for “bushido” or the “Way of the Warrior”. Looks very masculine at first glance. Pulling out the motherboard box, you will find windowed cutouts showcasing some of the unique features of the board. The motherboard itself is encased in a shockproof, antistatic, clear plastic container for further protection.
The board scheme is all black except for the blue ddr2 slots that matches the color of the LEDs underneath the board. These LEDs are quite nice really and for those that aren’t into it, you can finally turn it off and adjust its different modes through the BIOS. Hooray ABIT!
The ATX power supply header is located on the bottom center of the PCB directly below the DIMM slots. It also has a +12v connector just to the right of the DIMM slots and a 4-pin molex connector for dual PCI-Express power located on the top leftmost corner of the board.
The ABIT AW9D-MAX has 4 x 240-pin DIMM sockets up to 8Gb maximum. It supports Dual channel DDR2 667/800 Un-buffered ECC/ Non-ECC memory. The DIMM slots are also color coded for easy Dual Channel configuration.
There are 2 x PCI-E X16 for Dual ATI CrossFire Graphics, 2 x PCI-E X1, and 1 x PCI slot . There is also the presence of an Audio Riser port for the included audio riser card. An SLI connect card is also supplied. Now some might ask why include this when the board is designed for CrossFire. Well, apparently, there are modified drivers in the web that would allow you to run SLI on this board. Haven’t tried it myself but just shows you ABIT’s commitment to modders 
Dual IEEE1394 with up to 400MB/s transfer rates is provided by the Texas Instruments TSB43AB22A chip. Included in the package is a USB/Firewire bracket. It has 2 USB ports, 1 Firewire port and a Digital I/O port. Dual Gigabit LAN is provided by the Realtek RTL8111B chips. It enables blazingly fast network performance and allows for easy setup of private game servers as well as facilitating connections between your home network and the internet.
The AW9D-MAX also features ABIT’s uGURU technology. µGuru integrates a hardware microchip which interacts with Windows-based software applications to maximize PC performance and stability, while allowing for zero CPU usage. µGuru features ABIT AutoDrive™ overclocking, advanced audio features, auto FAN speed control, self-diagnostic H/W monitoring, one click BIOS updating, and 24 hours e-service. µGuru combines ABIT EQ, OC Guru, FlashMenu and BlackBox applications with a user-friendly interface, providing users perfect environment for performance and stability. For a full understanding of the uGURU technology, go here.
The board provides 7.1 channel audio performance backed by ABIT’s AudioMAX technology. It is powered by a Realtek 8820 chip. With the use of a separate daughter card for audio connectors, ABIT Engineers have greatly reduced the amount of noise caused by high frequencies generated from the motherboard. The only problem though with this setup is that if you’re running dual graphics, you will be forced to use the onboard audio solution. Although the realtek audio is a good one it is still not a proper hardware solution. The clearance between the 2nd PCIExpress slot and the only PCI slot available makes it almost impossible to get a high-end PCI audio solution in. So gamers wanting to use, say, their X-Fi will be highly disappointed.
ABIT AW9D-MAX Cooling Features
Motherboard cooling is provided by ABIT’s Silent OTES 2. This heatpipe contraption is a passive cooling system designed to deliver optimum cooling without the noise. It cools the southbridge, northbridge and the mosfets all at the same time. They have also attached additional big heatsinks, in mosfet standards, to the other mosfets. You will also find that underneath the board, ABIT have implemented some form of PCB cooling. They have placed copper strips directly below where the mosfets are to further draw away the heat from the PCB area. ABIT calls this cooling technology as OC Strips.
The Chipsets
The Intel 975X Express chipset is designed for systems based on the Intel Pentium 4 LGA775 processors and the latest generation Core 2 Duo processors. It also supports Dual ATI CrossFire Graphics and the latest DDR2 technologies. The i975X chipset contains 2 main components: the Memory Controller Hub (MCH) for the host bridge and the I/O Controller Hub for th I/O subsystem. The ABIT AW9D-MAX motherboard uses the Intel 82975X for the MCH and the Intel 82801GR (ICH7R) for the I/O Controller Hub.
Intel 82975X MCH- this is the northbridge. It comes in a Flip Chip Ball Grid Array (FCBGA) package. Its main function is to manage the flow of information between its four interfaces: the Processor interface (FSB), the System Memory interface (DRAM Controller), the Dual External Graphics interface (PCI-Express), and the I/O Controller through DMI interface.
Intel 82801GR (ICH7R)- this is the southbridge. It comes in a Micro Ball Grid Array (mBGA) package. This I/O Controller Hub contains the primary PCI interface, PCI-Express interface, SATA Controller, AHCI, Intel Matrix Storage Technology, IDE interface, Low Pin Count (LPC) interface, Serial Peripheral interface, APIC, USB2, LAN, ASF Management, and other I/O functions. It communicates with the MCH over a proprietary interconnect called Direct Media Interface (DMI).
BIOS
Focus will be on the 2 most important parts of the BIOS, the uGuru Utility and the Advance Chipset Features. These options are the ones that you would likely be playing with when pushing this board to the limits. Most of the other options are the common ones you see in most BIOSes and are self explanatory. Note that we used the latest official BIOS as of writing for our tests, BIOS ID: 12.
OC Guru
CPU Operating Speed- Selectable between AUTO or User Define. External clock can be manually adjusted from 133 to 600 in 1MHz increments.
Multiplier Factor- With our engineering sample processor, the E6700, the AW9D-MAX allows the BIOS to go down from 10x to 6x in increments of 1x.
N/B Strap CPU As- Can be set to AUTO, PSB667, PSB800 or PSB1066.
DRAM Spec (CPU:DRAM)- adjustable between By CPU (auto), 533 (1:1), 667 (4:5), and 800 (2:3).
Voltages Control- This can be set as Auto Detect or User Define. Here you can adjust the CPU, DDR2 and MCH & PCIe Voltage. Doesn’t seem like a lot but hopefully it should be enough to overclock this board to its max.
CPU- Can be adjusted up to 1.725v for our particular processor. This can done in increments of 0.025v. Default for our processor is 1.325v.
DDR2 Voltage- Can be adjusted from 1.8v- 2.3v in increments of 0.5v. Default for our particular test DDR2 is 2.2v.
MCH & PCIe Voltage- Can be adjusted from 1.5v to 2.0v in increments of 0.01v. Default is 1.5v.
ABIT EQ- This is further divided into ABIT EQ Beep Control, Temperature Monitoring, Voltage Monitoring, Fan Speed Monitoring and FanEQ Control. The Fan EQ controls the CPU, System fan, and AUX fans 1-4 and can be setup to automatically turn off and on at a certain reference temperature and voltage.
Test Setup
Corsair TWIN2X2048-8500C5 DDR2-1066 supplied by Corsair
Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66GHz) Engineering Sample supplied by Intel
Leadtek 7950GT Graphics supplied by ifocus
Western Digital 74Gb Raptor 10000 rpm SATA
Western Digital 80Gb 7200rpm IDE
Torture Rack supplied by Danger Den
Vapochill Lightspeed supplied by asetek
Corsair HX620W PSU supplied by Corsair
Windows XP Professional SP2
Nvidia Forceware 93.71
Direct X 9.0c
Comparison motherboard: Asus P5W64 WS Pro i975X Motherboard
Overclocking
I have to admit I have very high expectations from this board when it comes to overclocking. It is this department that will make or break this board. Enthusiast boards are judged by their performance in this test. It is what sets them apart. Luckily, the ABIT AW9D-MAX passed this test with flying colors! Simply put, we have never seen FSBs run as high as the ones we achieved using this board. If Intel’s Conroe is the overclocking king, then ABIT’s AW9D-MAX is its castle. Below are the overclocking results achieved using stock Intel cooling and extreme cooling.
Stock Cooling- Highest FSB & MHz
Out of the box, we were able to take this board up to a dizzying FSB of 435MHz rock solid. At this overclock, our Intel E6700 (2.66GHz) Conroe processor was running at 3.915GHz with a rated FSB of 1740MHz. A multiplier of 9x was used to reach this bus speed. That’s almost a 1.3GHz overclock out of the box with this Conroe chip. Now, that’s a pretty mean overclock using just stock cooling. Just shows you the overclocking potential of Intel’s new OC gem in conjunction with a great overclocking board like the ABIT AW9D-MAX.
Extreme Cooling- Highest FSB & MHz
Well, we have to find out just how far our system would go. To see how far our board can take the Conroe chip, we utilised asetek’s Vapochill Lightspeed phase change cooler. With the processor running at -20°C full load, we were able to overclock the system up to 4.35GHz rock solid! That’s almost 1.7GHz overclock over stock. We achieved this feat by setting our multiplier to 10x while running our FSB at 435MHz. We did our stability testing at this setting for 24hrs and the system didn’t crash during the entire duration. Truly amazing!
The system could actually boot into windows and get a cpuz snapshot up to 445MHz FSB but we couldn’t run any benchmarks anymore as the system would crash whenever we try to. It is worth noting that with this board, if overclocking goes over the limit, the board would revert to the last bootable settings after you power off or reset. Never did we clear our CMOS even once after a failed overclock. Now that’s how all overclocking boards should be made.
Test Results
We benchmarked the system at stock speed and compared it to its nearest competition. We also included the scores generated from the highest rock solid overclocks in the mix. For a better understanding of the various settings used, look at the table below.
Multimedia Benchmarks
In our encoding test, we used a program called DivX Converter. What it does is it converts your movie file into DivX format. For this test, we used a 100mb mpeg file. We timed how long it took the program to convert the file into DivX.
Another multimedia benchmark that we used is Photoshop 7 using Driverheaven’s custom benchmark. We took the overall time to complete all the tests using 12 different Photoshop filters.
Above results for both tests showed no difference between the AW9D-MAX and the competition. However, we can clearly see the big advantage the OC’ed systems had over the stock systems. Getting the job done 30-35% faster for free is definitely welcomed by any enthusiast.
Synthetic Benchmarks
We still feel that these benchmarks still have a place in testing and determining a computer’s performance. It may not represent real-world performance but it is a very good start in measuring overall or individual components of a computer system. However, extreme care should be taken in interpreting the results. They are only valid as long as you know the benchmark’s purpose and limitations. That is why it would be foolish to base your buying decisions purely on synthetic benchmarks. Of course, you all know that by now. For these tests, we used the famous Sisoft Sandra 2007, Futuremark’s 3DMark01 and SuperPi.
Above results for both tests showed no difference between the AW9D-MAX and the competition. However, we can clearly see the big advantage the OC’ed systems had over the stock systems. Getting the job done 30-35% faster for free is definitely welcomed by any enthusiast.
Again, Sandra 2007 tells the same story with both AW9D-MAX performing exactly the same on all 3 synthetic benchmarks.
Although a video benchmark, this version of 3dMark gives a very good idea of overall system performance. In this test, both boards delivered equal performance with the overclocked systems showing 25-30% extra performance.
Gaming
We used a resolution of 800×600 in all the tests. In cases where we can turn off shadows and FSAA, we did so as well. All these measures were taken so as to eliminate the video card as the bottleneck as much as we can.
As far as games go, the AW9D-MAX is at par with the competition. In most instances it is a tad faster but that advantage, however, equates to nothing in real world performance.
The overclocked AW9D-MAX though is a different beast. In most games, the overclocked AW9D-MAX (with stock cooling) demonstrated 40-45% performance increase. With extreme cooling, we see a 55-65% boost in all games except FEAR where it only achieved a 22% increase. Probably because this game is more video card reliant. Summing it up, we can clearly see the advantage this board can provide at high speed and FSB.
Conclusion
If you are waiting for a reason to upgrade, move to Intel or buy a new system, then I guess ABIT’s AW9D-MAX matched with a Conroe chip is a pretty damn good excuse. Our experience with this board has been very exciting and fulfilling to say the least. We’ve never seen FSB overclocking go this extreme before with just stock cooling.
It is very safe to say that the AW9D-MAX lived up to our expectations. It provided performance that is in line with the current high-end i975X board it was compared to and its stability and overclocking was extremely impressive. Aside from a few layout “flaws” like the placement of some of the SATA headers and the inability to use the PCI slot if running dual video cards, this board is almost perfect.
Overclocking wise, this board passed all our tests with flying colors. This board was definitely designed with overclocking in mind. There is no doubt that you will reach FSBs over the 400MHz mark with the AW9D-MAX. As you can see from our results, these overclocks were not only very high but they are rock solid as well. Out of the box, we achieved up to 45% performance increase in today’s famous and latest games. Add more cooling and you will definite get more performance out of the system.
If you are in the upgrade path and would want more from your system, then this board matched with a Conroe chip is highly recommended. If you are into overclocking, then the AW9D-MAX should definitely be on the top of your list. ABIT has once again reminded us why they are the pioneers of FSB overclocking. It is motherboards like this that set the standards for all overclocking boards to follow.