abit AW9D-Max Motherboard Review :: AW9D Max Features

Abit AW9D-MAX Spec Sheet
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Part Number	AW9D-MAX
Manufacturer	Abit
Price Check	Find Best Price
Downloads	BIOS Drivers Manuals
Chipset	Intel 975X Express ICH7R
North Bridge	Intel 82975X MCH
Socket	LGA775 Socket
Processor Types	Core 2 Extreme, Core 2 Duo, Pentium 4, Pentium D
Number of CPUs	1
Front Side Bus	1066/800/533MHz
Memory Type	DDR2
Memory Channels	Dual
Maximum Memory	8GB
External Graphics	PCI Express x16
IGP	None
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 x2
Firewire	IEEE 1394a
USB	USB 2.0
Expansion Slots
BIOS	AWARD
Form Factor	ATX

The AW9D-Max is based upon the 975X Express chipset. The 975X chipset supports every LGA-775 CPU on the market today including the Core 2 series, the Pentium Extreme Edition series, the Pentium D series, the 64-bit 6xx series, the Celeron D series and of course the single core Pentium 4 CPUs. I tested the board with our standard 3.8GHz 670 CPU, but also tried it out with an E6700 CPU without issue.

Almost every modern motherboard has 4 DIMM slots, with the exception of some mini-ATX boards that have two and some server boards that carry more. The AW9D-MAX has four DIMM slots supporting up to 8GB of unbuffered, non-ECC DDR2 800MHz memory. If you have a 32-bit Operating system, the maximum memory addressable is 4GB. Maximum memory bandwidth on the board is 6.4GB/second. Also note that we've slightly modified our motherboard scoring system to 1 point for 4 GB memory support and -1 for less than 4GB support, to reflect the fact that most boards support more than that.

Serial ATA drives are the norm for hard disk drives today. The more SATA connectors available on a motherboard the better is my opinion. The AW9D-MAX board supports 7 SATA connectors on the board, with 4 controlled by the Intel ICH7R South Bridge and an additional four controlled by a Silicon Image 3132 SATA controller. Three are on the board itself, an additional e-SATA port is on the back panel I/O. A IDE port and a Floppy port complete the board's drive expansion capabilities.

Intel decided to include support for multiple GPUs with their 975X chipset, which was not present in earlier motherboard chipsets. The 975X chipset supports ATI's Crossfire multi-GPU solution. I'm unsure as to whether Intel will continue to support Crossfire as ATI is now part of AMD. There are two PCI Express x16 slots on the AW9D-MAX. While running in Crossfire mode, the two PCI Express x16 slots operate in x8 mode, as the 975X chipset does not support enough PCI Express lanes to have them both run in x16 mode. Also present are two PCI Express x1 slots and a single PCI slot, a curious addition as many devices are now being released on the PCI Express bus but most add-ons are still PCI based.

Sound Driver Shots

Onboard audio is not provided by a onboard CODEC, but by the AudioMAX HD 7.1 add-on card that's installed on the AudioMAX slot dedicated for the onboard sound. The AudioMAX card contains all of the jacks to run the system with 7.1 surround sound, S/PDIF In/Out conveniently. The AudioMAX card contains a REALTEK HDA CODEC that is familiar to many board users, the ALC882. High Definition Audio is the replacement for the AC'97 audio standard. The back panel is relatively sparse by most standards due to the movement of the onboard audio to the AudioMAX card; there are no audio jacks on the back panel I/O. A e-SATA port, PS2 mouse, PS/2 keyboard, 4 USB 2.0 ports, 2 RJ-45 jacks for the onboard LAN, are all that are there with no serial ports, COM ports, or parallel ports as found on other boards with legacy ports.

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