Abit AW9D-MAX: When "Beta" MAX is a good thing
by Gary Key on September 8, 2006 3:10 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Basic Features
Abit has delivered a well optioned but very performance oriented 975X board that should sell for around US $229 or under. While our BIOS is still beta we were surprised at the stability of the motherboard during our benchmarking. We will provide screenshots and a more in-depth look at the BIOS once we receive a shipping version. At this time the one glaring omission is the lack of advanced DRAM timing control settings and a 1333 memory strap that would certainly let this board overclock further. Abit only allows the basic four timings to be changed (tCAS, tRCD, tRP, tRAS) and for a board of this caliber we believe this is a mistake. The ability to increase the MCH voltage to 2.00V and memory to 2.65V is impressive considering the limits on the other 975X based boards. However, we wish the memory settings above 2.35V were available in .05V increments instead of .10V increments.
One of the main BIOS issues consisted of the inability of the board to lower the CPU multiplier on standard Core 2 Duo processors (and raise it on the Core 2 Extreme), a feature available in current Gigabyte and ASUS boards. The weirdest issue was that setting the PCI Express speed above 100Mhz would render our SATA drives inoperable in most instances. We had to hunt and peck for an acceptable increase in the PCI Express speed before our drives would be recognized. Our Seagate drives would work at 102 and 108 at certain times while our WD SE16 drives would only work at 105 with the Raptors not working at anything above 100MHz. In the end, none of the SATA drives would work above 100MHz consistently so we left this setting at the default.
We also had trouble overclocking the board at first unless we disabled the Abit EQ thermal controls. This held true when trying to increase our CPU or memory voltages at various times. If the system defaulted to standard EQ limit settings (memory voltage at 2.1V maximum) then we would have to disable the Abit EQ controls, set our increased voltages, and then enable EQ before we could overclock the system. Although this typically worked, the bios would sometimes lose its way and no longer accept the extended voltage settings we specified in the EQ utility. We ended up disabling EQ voltage monitoring altogether during overclocking. Our remaining issue was the bios was unforgiving with specific DDR2 modules at certain settings. We generally found that the 4:5 ratio would work at times with our other DDR2-800 test modules when a 1:1 ratio would not and vice versa. We certainly believe from our discussions with Abit that these BIOS issues will be fixed before retail release but the board basically works fine at this time.
| Abit AW9D-MAX Specifications | |
| Market Segment: | Performance Enthusiast |
| CPU Interface: | Socket T (Socket 775) |
| CPU Support: | LGA775-based Pentium 4, Celeron D, Pentium D, Pentium EE, Core 2 Duo |
| Chipset: | Intel 975X + ICH7R |
| Bus Speeds: | 133 to 600 in 1MHz Increments |
| Memory Speeds: | SPD, 533, 667, 800 |
| NorthBridge Strap: | CPU, 1066, 800, 533 |
| PCIe Speeds: | Auto, 100MHz~200MHz |
| PCI: | Fixed at 33.33 |
| Core Voltage: | Base CPU V to 1.7250V in 0.0250V increments |
| CPU Clock Multiplier: | Auto, 6x-11x in 1X increments if CPU is unlocked |
| DRAM Voltage: | 1.75V ~ 2.65V in .05V or .10V increments, above 2.35V all increments are .10V. |
| DRAM Timing Control: | SPD, 4 Options |
| NB Voltage: | 1.50V ~ 2.00V in .01V increments |
| Memory Slots: | Four 240-pin DDR2 DIMM Slots Dual-Channel Configuration Regular Unbuffered Memory to 8GB Total |
| Expansion Slots: | 2 - PCIe X16 (x8 operation in multi-GPU setup) 2 - PCIe X1 1 - PCI Slot 2.3 1 - Audio Max Slot |
| Onboard SATA/RAID: | 4 SATA 3Gbps Ports - Intel ICH7R (RAID 0,1,1+0,JBOD) 3 SATA 3Gbps Ports - Silicon Image 3132 1 e-SATA 3Gbps Port - Silicon Image 3132 |
| Onboard IDE: | 1 ATA100/66/33 Port (2 drives) - Intel ICH7R |
| Onboard USB 2.0/IEEE-1394: | 8 USB 2.0 Ports - 4 I/O Panel - 4 via Headers 2 Firewire 400 Ports by TI TSB43AB22A - via Headers |
| Onboard LAN: | Gigabit Ethernet Controller - PCI-E Interface Realtek RTL 8111B |
| Onboard Audio: | Realtek ALC882M HD-Audio 8-channel CODEC - Dolby Master Studio |
| Power Connectors: | ATX 24-pin, 8-pin EATX 12V, 4-pin 12V Molex |
| I/O Panel: | 1 x PS/2 Keyboard 1 x PS/2 Mouse 2 x RJ45 1 x eSATA 4 x USB 2.0/1.1 |
| BIOS Revision: | AWARD W628 - Beta |
Abit has delivered a well optioned but very performance oriented 975X board that should sell for around US $229 or under. While our BIOS is still beta we were surprised at the stability of the motherboard during our benchmarking. We will provide screenshots and a more in-depth look at the BIOS once we receive a shipping version. At this time the one glaring omission is the lack of advanced DRAM timing control settings and a 1333 memory strap that would certainly let this board overclock further. Abit only allows the basic four timings to be changed (tCAS, tRCD, tRP, tRAS) and for a board of this caliber we believe this is a mistake. The ability to increase the MCH voltage to 2.00V and memory to 2.65V is impressive considering the limits on the other 975X based boards. However, we wish the memory settings above 2.35V were available in .05V increments instead of .10V increments.
One of the main BIOS issues consisted of the inability of the board to lower the CPU multiplier on standard Core 2 Duo processors (and raise it on the Core 2 Extreme), a feature available in current Gigabyte and ASUS boards. The weirdest issue was that setting the PCI Express speed above 100Mhz would render our SATA drives inoperable in most instances. We had to hunt and peck for an acceptable increase in the PCI Express speed before our drives would be recognized. Our Seagate drives would work at 102 and 108 at certain times while our WD SE16 drives would only work at 105 with the Raptors not working at anything above 100MHz. In the end, none of the SATA drives would work above 100MHz consistently so we left this setting at the default.
We also had trouble overclocking the board at first unless we disabled the Abit EQ thermal controls. This held true when trying to increase our CPU or memory voltages at various times. If the system defaulted to standard EQ limit settings (memory voltage at 2.1V maximum) then we would have to disable the Abit EQ controls, set our increased voltages, and then enable EQ before we could overclock the system. Although this typically worked, the bios would sometimes lose its way and no longer accept the extended voltage settings we specified in the EQ utility. We ended up disabling EQ voltage monitoring altogether during overclocking. Our remaining issue was the bios was unforgiving with specific DDR2 modules at certain settings. We generally found that the 4:5 ratio would work at times with our other DDR2-800 test modules when a 1:1 ratio would not and vice versa. We certainly believe from our discussions with Abit that these BIOS issues will be fixed before retail release but the board basically works fine at this time.
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johnsonx - Saturday, September 9, 2006 - link
Thanks Gary. Those look interesting; I don't imagine they're overly effective given complete the lack of airflow behind the mainboard in 99.9% of systems. However I suppose just the additional radiative area is enough; in most system layouts they'll be near the upper edge of the mainboard, so convection will carry the heat into the air flow around the power supply and back fan(s).Presumably Abit didn't put them back there just to amuse themselves.
hibachirat - Friday, September 8, 2006 - link
Thanks Gary, but...i could have sworn that i saw strips like that on the back of my 775i65 . I didn't pay them any attention...or maybe it was it the motherboard i installed the week before--a Gigabyte. Crap, now i have to disassemble and look...Gary Key - Friday, September 8, 2006 - link
Pictures will be up later this evening. Sorry about the delay but we had a technical issue.hibachirat - Friday, September 8, 2006 - link
Yeah, I wanted to see that too. Plus maybe a night shot or mpeg of the disco diodes in action. :-pSeriously Abit, scrap the light show and give me back my old school serial and parallel ports! Once or twice a year I need my PC to talk to old hardware. And one PCI slot? This isn't a mATX board.
StrangerGuy - Friday, September 8, 2006 - link
Drop the multipier to 7x when testing mobo overclockability. Think for the E6300 users, besides you may hit the CPU ceiling before the mobo one with 9x.Gary Key - Friday, September 8, 2006 - link
We dropped the X6800 down to 8X and again to 6X. As stated our board and bios combination would not post past 460FSB. Abit is getting near 480 in their labs now and we hope to see a new bios spin in the next couple of days for our board. The same limitation holds true with our E6300/6400 processors, very stable up to 448FSB at this time but we hit a hard lock at 460FSB. I will provide an update once the new bios arrives.imaheadcase - Friday, September 8, 2006 - link
Anyone remember top of the line boards used to cost less than $150?These boards are way to expensive, the preminum your paying for a board to OC kinda defeats the purpose of OC to get better performance for cheap imo.
mostlyprudent - Friday, September 8, 2006 - link
It's all about market share. Even in the good-ole days (6/8 months ago) of AMD 939 and nVidia nForce4, the top boards occassionally debuted above $200, but did not stay there long. 975X chipset based boards were ridiculously priced even when there was no real reason to choose the platform. We NEED more competition!GoatMonkey - Friday, September 8, 2006 - link
Top of the line boards for a long time didn't include decent sound, network, usb, multiple hard drive controllers with raid capability. You can still get a good board for less than $150, but they sometimes cut some of the high end features that are so nice to have.Jedi2155 - Friday, September 8, 2006 - link
Same with the DFI Lanparty NF4-Ultra only $130 for pretty much everything you listed along with extra's. SLI was $160 or so.