Abit AW8-MAX Motherboard Review :: The Board

Abit AW8-MAX Spec Sheet
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Part Number	AW8-MAX
Manufacturer	Abit
Price Check	Find Best Price
Downloads	BIOS Drivers Manuals
Chipset	Intel 955X Express ICH7R
North Bridge	Intel 82955X MCH
Socket	LGA775 Socket
Processor Types	Pentium 4
Number of CPUs	1
Front Side Bus	1066/800MHz
Memory Type	DDR2
Memory Channels	Dual
Maximum Memory	8GB
External Graphics	PCI Express x16
IGP	Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950
South Bridge	Intel 82801GR ICH7R
Audio	8-channel
IDE	100/66/33
SCSI	None
SATA	3.0 GB/s
RAID	0, 1, 0+1, 5, 10
LAN	10/100/1000
Firewire	IEEE 1394b/a
USB	USB 2.0
Expansion Slots
BIOS	AWARD
Form Factor	ATX

The ABIT AW8-Max supports all current Intel LGA-775 CPUs including the 840 Extreme Edition, the 670 3.8GHz and earlier CPUs. The 955X operates at up to a 533MHz FSB, allowing installation of the 3.73GHz Extreme Edition CPUs as well. With the new Dual Core CPUs, HyperThreading is present only on the 840 EE.

CPU Socket

Socket Open

Memory support on the board comes in the vein of 4 DIMM (Dual In-line Memory Modules). The 955X chipset supports up to 8GB of Dual Channel Un-buffered Non-ECC DDR2 memory when a 64-bit OS (Operating System) is used, 4GB when Windows 32-bit is used. ABIT differentiates their Dual-Channel by color coding pairs. Simply put a matching pair in matching color slots and it'll work just fine.

Memory Slots

PCIx x16 Slot

PCI Slots

ABIT's board has one PCI Express x16 slot for the graphics card. Some 955x boards have dual slots, but are limited to x4 connectivity on the second slot. Also present on the board are two PCI Express x1 slots two PCI V2.3 compliant slots and a slot for ABIT's AUDIOMAX card. One thing about the board that bothered me though, was I wish ABIT included another PCI or PCI Express x1 slot, as 4 slots is not much expansion room for the power user and may be limiting for some.

Drive expansion on the board, on the other hand, is excellent. The 955X chipset supports up to 4 SATA ports with the ICH7R North Bridge natively. ABIT went the extra mile by including a Silicon Image Sil3132 chip with two additional SATA ports. Both controllers support SATAII technology, allowing for 3 Gb/second of transfer, instead of the 1.5 found on SATA1. Intel's Matrix Storage technology allows for RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 modes. One IDE controller and one Floppy Drive controller make up the rest of the drive expansion on the board. The Input Output area of the AW8-Max board is very interesting. ABIT pioneered quiet cooling on the North Bridge chip with their Silent-Outside –Thermal-Exhaust-System. Due to the grill on the rear of the board, there is no parallel or COM ports on this board. ABIT did include PS/2 Mouse/Keyboard ports, 2 RJ45 jacks for the LAN, and 4 USB 2.0 ports and an IEEE-1394 port.

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