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Introduction
Read the words AA8 DuraMAX and what images get conjured up in your mind? If it's not a condom brand, it's a battery. That
Duracell make an
AA8 Energizer
MAX cell is enough grounds for a joke if ever I saw one. Send them in, the best of which will win nothing at all.
Hilarity aside, you can't have failed to notice the less than overwhelming splash that Intel's new Pentium 4 platform made recently. While it certainly brings to the table the biggest single shift in technology yet seen in the consumer space, it did so with little to no reason to upgrade to it, at the time of writing.
PCI Express graphics cards are nowhere to be seen in quantity, DDR-II memory is expensive and performs no better than a decent DDR-I setup at this point in time and often does worse. HD Audio is a nice inclusion, but it's not limited to the Pentium 4 platform and neither is it streets ahead of what's available. PCI Express peripherals are even more rare than their PEG16X graphics brethren.
Add to that the fact there's less than a large amount of LGA775 CPUs on the market, followed by the rumours that the socket is less than resilient to a new CPU install, and you've got one big pile of technology that nobody wants to take a bite of.
At least mainboards are around though, eh? All of Intel's major mainboard manufacturing partners have at least announced, and the majority are actually shipping, mainboard designs that incorporate Intel's new platform enhancements, based around their new Alderwood and Grantsdale core logic.
ABIT are no different, bringing an initial triplet of new LGA775 mainboard designs, two using the new chipsets and a third using i865PE (Springdale), kicking and screaming into the world.
Their flagship LGA775 board is the previously piss-taken AA8 DuraMAX. Based on Alderwood (i925X), it seeks to bring all that new platform loving to an enthusiast friendly board. Let's take a closer look to see how ABIT implement the new Pentium 4 platform, comparing it to Intel's own i925X board along the way.
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