Abit AW9D-MAX

Author: Richard Swinburne
Published: 10th November 2006
Comments (50) Stumble
There is no doubt about it this board looks the pimp in all black. It's a colour you can't go wrong with; dealt in subtlety and hiding away behind all your cards and heatsink at the back of the case. Underneath there are six blue LEDs to give an ambient light that flash in a range of six alternative ways, or either all on or all off.

Silent heatpipe cooling is integrated for all the major chipsets and voltage regulation components, which gives an interesting rear I/O panel. Seeing as they are just held in with push pins, water-cooling bods will enjoy the potential ease of transition. Abit doesn't provide extra fans, in case you're running a fanless system. There really shouldn't be much of a need for them; however, we always recommend a decent amount of case airflow in order to stop general hotspots and heat build up that can lead to instability.

There's not a huge amount of extra space around the CPU socket. Although we had no problems during testing, some extra large coolers may hit either of the two 40mm square MAX heatsinks.

Abit AW9D-MAX Board Layout
Abit AW9D-MAX Board Layout
The AudioMAX daughter board is built around the Realtek ALC882M which offers Dolby Master Studio support including Dolby Live, Virtual Surround IIx (2x) and Dolby Headphone, as well as eight channel sound with S/PDIF. Using a daughter board instead of integrating it on the main PCB allows better signalling from the audio codec and cleaner sound. Sure, it's no X-Fi or Sondigo Inferno (as we've previously seen), but it's a bit better than you'd otherwise get.

Abit uses 100% solid aluminium electrolytic capacitors across the board, improving signal quality and capacitor life. This provides better stability at higher clock speeds, but at an extra cost over standard caps. For an enthusiast board this is arguably necessary to give it that bit extra, considering the boards cost will be at the high-end anyway.

With the 975X chipset from Intel you get ATI CrossFire support, albeit at "half" speed - x8/x8 speeds of the two PCI-Express x16 slots. Interestingly, Abit supplies an SLI bridge in the box as well, which almost implies Abit is sanctioning the unofficial support for SLI on 975X using the hacked Forceware drivers that are available around the net.

Abit AW9D-MAX Board Layout
There's plenty of space under the PCI-Express slots for the graphics cards to breathe - however, CrossFire (or SLI) is at the expense of the only PCI slot on the board (should you use a dual-slot cooler). Unfortunately, this is the future of many boards: choosing (unused) PCI-Express x1 over (more usable) PCI slots. Motherboard manufacturers don't seem to be talking to add-in board makers on that front. With two dual-slot cards installed, you're merely left with a single PCI-Express x1 slot for your expansion.

You get the usual POST diagnostic hex readout to help debug why something hasn't worked on boot up (with using the manual for reference), which is arguably necessary feature on enthusiast boards.

The colour setup isn't going to help first time buyers who rely on differentiating colours on PCI slots and other components to know what goes where, but I wouldn't recommend an enthusiast board like this to those who don't know what they're doing in the first place: it would be wasted. Despite the overall black theme the pin outs for the front panel, USB and Firewire pins are all colour co-ordinated.

You'll know what goes where even if you're on your hands and knees under the desk trying to look for the those pins, when you realise you actually do need those extra USB ports. It even has some power and reset buttons on the board itself for those who enjoy bench testing and tweaking outside a case.

Layout Summary:

Generally, everything is well placed; most of the plugs are scattered around the board in places of easy access and we found only a few conflicts during use. First, the memory slots are quite close the top PCI slot, making it slightly difficult to remove memory modules with one of the longer graphics cards installed.

Next is that the SATA slot by the CPU socket is slightly awkward to use. We would have preferred a second eSATA socket instead, as there is more than enough space on the rear I/O. Finally, the additional 4-pin molex power is right underneath the AudioMAX daughter board slot. With both installed, trying to pull out the molex can take off some capacitors from the daughterboard - so we highly advise removing the audio card first.

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