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Introduction

Yes, we have another Socket 775 motherboard review for you - with the success of the Core 2 Duo, you will keep seeing new motherboards for it; which means we will continue reviewing them!

Today we are looking at an enthusiast oriented board from Abit.  Historically Abit has been a name brand for enthusiasts and overclockers everywhere for well over a decade, but in the last year and a half we haven't had an Abit product in our labs.  This is the first Abit board we have looked at since May of 2005, when we reviewed the Abit AA8XE. At that time Tom found that the AA8XE was a decent, if not spectacular overclocker, hitting a 275MHz FSB, a 37.5% overclock. 

For a while now companies like DFI and Asus have been slowly eroding the mindshare Abit had earned with their own amazingly overclocker friendly products. Since then, Abit has been working hard to reposition itself and regain the favor of the enthusiast community - making their boards, and especially their BIOS, more overclocking friendly.

So with that said, let's introduce to you the Abit AB9 Pro that we're looking at in this review.  This is Abit's newest generation Intel P965 board with a great set of features, all of which are listed below, including a personal favorite, a POST LED display - not to mention more SATA2 ports than you can shake a stick at!  As you will see in later pages this board is definitely designed with the overclocker in mind - just check out the BIOS shots and our benchmark/overclocking results to see what we mean.

Abit is trying to recapture the hearts and minds of overclockers everywhere - will they succeed?

Specifications

The AB9 Pro has plenty of features - here is a full list of its specifications:

	Processor Support Intel Core 2 Duo Pentium® & Pentium® D processors with1066/800MHz FSB Support Intel® 2006FMB Conroe CPU
	Chipset Intel® P965 / ICH8R Chipset
	Memory 4 X 240-pin DIMM sockets support max. memory capacity 8GB Supports Dual channel DDR2 800/667/533 Un-buffered Non-ECC memory
	LAN On board Dual PCI-E Gigabit LAN controller supports 10/100/ 1000M Ethernet
	Audio On board 7.1 CH HD Audio CODEC Supports auto jack sensing and optical S/PDIF Out
	Expansion Slots 1 x PCI-E X16 2 x PCI-E X1 2 x PCI
	Internal I/O 1 x Floppy Port supports up to 2.88 MB 1 x Ultra DMA 100/66/33 IDE connector 9 x SATA 3Gb/s connector 3 x USB header (support 4 ports) 1 x FP-Audio, 1 x CD-In
	Back Panel I/O 1 x PS/2 Keyboard, 1 x PS/2 Mouse abit Silent OTES™ 1 x S/P DIF In, 1 x S/P DIF Out, 1 x eSATA 7.1 CH Audio connector (Front, Line-in, MIC-in, Center/Subwoofer, Surround, Rear Surround) 4 x USB 2.0, 2 x RJ-45 LAN connector
	Serial ATA 6 x SATA 3Gb/s offer by Intel® ICH8R support Intel® Matrix Storage Tech(AHCI & RAID 0/1/5 /10) 2 x SATA 3Gb/s offer by JMicron® JMB363 support up to 0,1,0+1,JBOD RAID function 1 x SATA 3Gb/s offer by Silicon Image 3132 to 0,1,0+1,JBOD RAID function 1 x SATA 3Gb/s offer by Silicon Image 3132
	Form Factor ATX form factor 305 x 245mm PCB Color: Orange
	RoHS 100% lead-free process and RoHS compliant
	abit Engineered abit SoftMenu™ Technology abit μGuru™ Technology abit Silent OTES™ Technology