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Introduction

Abit have had a fairly rough recent history but despite their financial woes of the past year, they have managed to stay quite competitive. With the introduction of Core 2 Duo this summer many enthusiasts in fact were looking towards Abit in anticipation of what we have for review today - the AW9-D Max.

The AW9 series was unveiled this August and arrived just in time for the masses upgrading to new Core 2 based systems. Abit are looking to compete with ASUS, Gigabyte, Foxconn and MSI with this latest board and have put together a very intriguing package promising amazing overclocking which we will explore later in the article

While they are essentially identical, the AW9-D series has been broken down into two boards, the AW9-D and the AW9-D Max edition which we have on the test bench today. The Max edition board features an added SATA controller for a total of 8 ports while the non Max edition only features four. That is the major difference between the two boards however the 'Max' variation also has an SPDIF out port. It's nice that Abit have kept the primary selling points of the new AW9D seried consistent across both models as there is a roughyl $40 price differential between the two . Here's a quick look at the specs of the AW9-D Max.

Specifications

	Processor - Designed for Intel® LGA775 processors with1066/800MHz FSB - Supports Intel® Core™ 2 Duo(Extreme Edition) & Pentium® Extreme Edition & Pentium® D & Pentium® 4 Processors - Supports Intel® Hyper-Threading / XD-bit / EM64T / EIST Technology / Virtualization Technology - Intel® Quad Core ready.
	Chipset - Intel® 975X / Intel® ICH7R Express Chipset
	Memory - 4 X 240-pin DIMM sockets support max. memory capacity 8GB - Supports Dual channel DDR2 800/667 Un-buffered / Non-ECC memory
	Graphics - Supports Dual PCI-Express X16 slots (dual ATI® CrossFire™ Graphics)
	LAN - On-board Dual PCI-E Gigabit LAN controller supports 10/100/ 1000M Ethernet
	Audio - abit AudioMAX™ HD 7.1 CH - Supports Jack Sensing and S/PDIF In/Out - Dolby® Master Studio Certificated
	Expansion Slots - 2xPCI-EX16,2xPCI-EX1,1 xPCI, 1x AudioMAX™
	Internal I/O Connectors - 1 x Floppy port, 1 x UDMA 100/66/33 connector - 7 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors - 2 x USB 2.0 headers, 2 x IEEE1394 headers - 1 x FP-Audio header, 1 x CD-IN
	Back Panel I/O - 1 x PS/2 Keyboard, 1 x PS/2 Mouse - 4 x USB 2.0, 2 x RJ-45 LAN - 1 x eSATA
	Serial ATA - ICH7R: 4 x SATA 3Gb/s supports Intel® Matrix Storage SATA RAID 0/1/0+1/5 - ICH7R: Support SATA AHCI, providing native command queuing and native hot plug & play - Silicon Image:3132: 4 x SATA 3Gb/s, two SATA connectors of the same area can support SATA RAID 0/1
	IEEE 1394 - 2 ports IEEE1394a at 400 Mb/s transfer rate
	abit Engineered - abit µGuru™ Technology - abit AudioMAX™ HD 7.1 CH - abit Silent OTES™ 2 Technology - Quick Power & Reset Buttons - Back-light Blue LED's - Low ESR and high ripple conductive polymer aluminum solid capacitors
	RoHS RoHS Compliancy
	Form Factor - ATX form factor 305 x 245mm - PCB Color: Black & Blue