Abit AB9 Motherboard Manufacturer Abit Category Motherboard Socket Socket 775 LGA Chipset Intel P965 Editor Winston Chim "... the AB9 for the mainstream market is a good all-rounder. It performs well and offers good overclocking capabilities."

Abit releases the P965 based AB9 for Core 2 Duo processors.   

INTRODUCTION

Motherboards supporting Intel's Core 2 Duo processors are now coming in thick and fast. And many manufacturers are ready, not to waste this opportunity, as they forsee that the sales of the Core 2 Duo processors will increase, over the next few months. Abit having already produced some very nice motherboards for both the socket-939 and socket-775, they have now released a whole new series designed for the Core 2 Duo processors.

   

As I have said before, not everyone is into the enthusiast market, and we know that this market is only a small part of a bigger picture. A large part of any manufacturer's business is the mainstream and budget markets. Do we really need Dual SLI/Crossfire compatibility or support EPP memory for the average PC user? Personally, I think it's all a bit OTT. For this reason, Abit's latest motherboard, the AB9 is aimed at the mainstream market.

It's based on Intel's P965 chipset and utilises the ICH8 southbridge. The P965 chipset is designed for the mainstream market and only offers 1x16 PCIe for graphics support,. It's bigger brother however, the i975X chipset is designed for the enthusiast market, and has 2x16 PCIe supporting Crossfire mode.

A cut down version of the i975X ... you might say. Well, the P965's lack of support for 2x16 Crossfire capability is not a handicap. Most of the motherboards that we've tested which uses the P965 chipset, only offers 1x16 PCIe slot for graphics. Is this a good or bad thing? Remember, the P965 is really, aimed at the mainstream market, and 1x16 PCIe is more than enough for even the most modest of gamers. I am still only using a single Geforce 7800GTX !!

The AB9 from Abit is not their high-end motherboard supporting the Core 2 Duo processors. So we didn't expect it  to have all the bells and whistles as their other enthusiast products. Having said that, it does feature their Abit uGuru overclocking utility and diagnistic LEDs.

OK, let's not waste anymore time and take a closer look at the Abit AB9 motherboard ...