Thoughts, HEXUS.awards, HEXUS.right2reply
It's hard to ignore the slot layout on the AW9D Max when thinking about it as a whole, but ignore it we will. We champion better slot layouts here at HEXUS all the time, but it's clear that when it's a high-end board the consumer almost always goes into a purchase with eyes wide open after careful consideration. So we'll emulate that train of thought and not knock the board for it, and instead focus on the rest for the user that's still interested.The secondary layout is good, but not great, the Sil3132 locations meaning the ports connected to them are in fairly poor places (barring the eSATA port which demands positioning on the I/O backplane). However pin headers are excellently labelled, the flashing LED feature can be switched off and adjusted (thank Ghu), power connector placement is excellent and the aesthetic is well judged.
You can't use the board upside down because of the heatpipes either, but that's the last physical specific worth mentioning. It's a good board overall, just with minor niggles in a couple of places.
The BIOS is brill, letting you adjust all relevant settings easily for performance adjustment and overclocking, and the monitoring and fan adjustment control is absolutely excellent and entirely peerless. abit back to their BIOS-level best? We'd find it hard to argue, USB keyboard niggle aside.
Performance was as expected, overclocking saw us take the board easily past 450MHz on the CPU bus frequency (a popular marker for low-end Core 2 Duo overclocks, Bu-Do-Gi indeed!) and the presentation and bundle are as befits a high-end SKU.
That means if the big caveat doesn't matter to you, the AW9D Max is a mainboard we find very easy to recommend. For the high-end Core 2 Duo user it should appeal in a number of ways, adjustability, overclocking, performance and looks most of all in our opinion. The slot layout has to sit well with you though, of course. Great stuff from abit.
HEXUS Awards
abit AW9D Max
