Abit's flagship motherboard for Intel Core 2 processors really hits the mark. It's an enthusiast's board through and through. 

INTRODUCTION

We recently reviewed Abit's AB9 motherboard which uses the Intel P965 chipset. It was aimed at the mainstream market and lacked some of the features normally associated with high-end/performance users. We thought that it was OK, performed OK and price was OK too. All-in-all it was a OK motherboard. So, when we received Abit's flagship Intel board for testing... we expected it to be more than OK.

My first impressions from the package was very good. It had all the same flavours as their AN9 32X Fatal1ty motherboard. So, I was hoping to expect something similar. Looking at the motherboard itself, I find high quality solid capacitors ... mmm, now that's a good start. Then I noticed there's a new verison of their OTES heatpipe cooling ... excellent. Later, I realised that there's too many extra features to remember without writing them down. Could this be a sign?

Abit being a specialist in the enthusiast market, have released their flagship Intel motherboard. It utilises Intel's i975X chipset and offers ATI Crossfire compatibility as well as support for 1066FSB and Intel's latest Core 2 Duo processors.

Being an enthusiast's board, you expect the AW9D-Max to have some extra features ... well, how about Abit's OTES Max heatpipe cooling for the chipsets. Funky onboard LEDs featured on the motherboard (which are all controlled via the uGuru in the BIOS). There's also the 7.1 AudioMax onboard audio with separate daughter card, 8-pin ATX 12v connector (for extra power and stability), 8 SATA connectors and of course 2 x 16 PCIe slots for Crossfire support.

The AW9D-Max uses the same award winning uGuru overclocking feature, found on most of their motherboards. It's a great utility which features diagnostic LEDs, and in the BIOS, you can adjust various settings for overclocking. We're hoping to achieve a CPU3D record in overclocking our humble E6400. Can it be done? Our current record was using a Gigabyte DQ6, we managed to overclock the E6400 to 3.36GHZ (8x420).

We're expecting the AW9D-Max to really make a mark in the enthusiast's market. Armed with all these extra features, I can see it doing really well.

OK, let's not waste anymore time and take a closer look at the Abit AW9D-Max motherboard ...