Abit previews next overclocker-friendly mobo

[D_o_S]

Abit has been showing signs of returning to the good old days ever since the USI takeover that resolved all of the company's financial problems.

Abit's new overclocker friendly mobo is the AW9D-MAX.

MAX is Abit's flagship brand for overclockers - the MAX series boards are primarily designed with enthusiasts looking to overclock in mind, whereas the Fatal1ty series are primarily designed for rock solid stability and gaming - everything else is secondary.

The AW9D-MAX is by no means finished yet, as the company is still contemplating adding more features, and tweaking the aesthetics of the board before it reaches the market. It is based on Intel's 975X/ICH7R chipset, and features support for the upcoming Core 2 Duo processors and DDR2-800 memory speeds. There are a total of eight SATA 3Gbps ports included - one is an external e-SATA port, and all other SATA ports seem to be in reasonably accessible locations. There is also support for a pair of ATI video cards in CrossFire mode, thanks to the dual PCI-Express x16 slots.

However, the lone PCI slot will be blocked if using a pair of Radeon X1900's in CrossFire. Having said that though, the additional AudioMAX slot for the included Realtek ALC880-based HD Audio daughter card, the need for an add-in sound card isn't quite as crucial as it is on some solutions.

http://www.techpowerup.com/img/06-06-11/aw9d-max_large_thm.jpg (http://www.techpowerup.com/img/06-06-11/aw9d-max_large.jpg)

Source: Bit-tech (http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/06/10/abit_previews_aw9d-max/)

[oldschool]

What a TOTALLY clueless mobo design. This thing wouldn't even make a good paperweight.

[KennyT772]

im sick of all the crappy layouts
according to the atx standard there are a max of 7 expansion card slots. today its common to only see five physical slots on the mobo with the top and bottom being ommited. it should be like this
-------- x16
- x1
-------- x16
- x1
---- x4
------- pci
------- pci

[EastCoasthandle]

im sick of all the crappy layouts
according to the atx standard there are a max of 7 expansion card slots. today its common to only see five physical slots on the mobo with the top and bottom being ommited. it should be like this
-------- x16
- x1
-------- x16
- x1
---- x4
------- pci
------- pci
QFT
I am also tired of these crappy layouts. The lack of PCI slots is getting dumb and dumbier by the minute. All this does is reduce production costs:
reduce components = less money
reduced trace layouts = less money
While still charging you a premium thus more profit thats all. Are those savings passed on to you the consumer? Do you really think they saved money by cutting corners...come on man, think!

[Homeless]

i'm sure it will be nice, but i rather buy a dfi

[sinner33]

Nice board, but like Homeless said, I'd rather stick with DFI for it's probably superior overclocking, MSI for good overclocking and built in 24 bit audigy and slick looks, or Asus, for they're a bigger company with conservative layouts.

[BigD6997]

yeah i like my x-fi sound card and all of these stupid layouts keep me from buying a mobo that i like, cuz pci slots are in the wrong places and im not liking it

[warlockza]

Hi guys
I'm from ABIT and I've been involved in certain aspects of the design of the Aw9D-Max. The way "some" of you guys are dissing it without real qualification is unsettling. If you don't like something, please state why. This board is set to rock the known world, since it has conroe support as well as XE support. unlike the 965 platform which only supports conroe.
Anyway way too early in the game to be so negative. Abit have always been in the top two or three in performance, but we are now pretty close to the top. With this or the next generation we will be back where we belong. 1st place.

Please guys we need your encouragement and support, not outright disrespect. We put huge amounts of effort in trying to keep everyone happy and if more people replied it would be great.
Kind regards
Peter

[BigD6997]

im very sorry you saw it as disrespect, i love abit i used to have one of your boards and it was realy easy to set up with decent overclocking and great stability. It seems like it would be a great board, and its great you are looking for overclockers because more overclocker friendly boards are what we need! The comments are not thrown directly at this board, more so at many boards that dont let you use the pci slot as many of us have some sort of pci card we would like to use, in my case a x-fi sound card. This has steard me away from a few motherboards that i would have loved to buy. But if i used onboard sound i would buy one of these boards right away, as well as most boards like this use the bottum pcie slot as the main slot, this as well is not very encouraging to buyers as it means that the pci slot is always out of use, since most people buying this will have a card that takes up 2 slots from cooling. I encourage you to make overclocker friendly boards, as DFI owns that market right now, that is why i now have a DFI LP UT Expert Board, and i would love to have more of a choice.

thank you for listening
Drew

[sefu]

I was a Abit fan, but the layount sucks, i pas to Asus witch is a grea wire managemt frendly mb, i was hoping that Abit will recover after was salvage from faliment, but sems to me that is going down with all this new ugly mb, look how god a asus mobo can be.

[wazzledoozle]

Abit has really gone down the drain since the Socket A days.

[Alec§taar]

Abit has really gone down the drain since the Socket A days.

Oh, I dunno:

I ran an Abit VP-6 SMP/Dual Pentium III 1ghz rig, o/c'd to 1152mhz & "fully tricked out" as it could be, parts-wise!

A photo of it was posted to these forums in a thread once, messy inside, & insane GeForce 4 Ti4600 vidcard mod in it, here:

http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=13148

And, above all - it's STILL running to this day, & I built it back in 2000 iirc!

* It's 6 years old & working as a server in a company in fact...

(I also keep an Abit IC7-Max III H/T capable mobo here w/ a Pentium 4 3.2ghz still running in my SQLServer 2003/IIS 6.x development server here, runs solid as the day I built it back in 2003... it's on 3 years old running strong too!)

That Abit IC7-Max III series was MASSIVELY well-received & rated too - else I would not have bought it... same with the older first rig I mention, in the Abit VP-6 SMP mobo!

:)

* It all really may depend on your personal experiences though... I've just usually had really GOOD luck with Abit boards, using Intel CPU's!

APK

P.S.=> That signature of yours - it's HILARIOUS man! lol... apk