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Written by Dusan Srbljak
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Monday, 13 August 2007 |
The author of this article came to love ABIT brand in the time of nForce2 motherboards, when the already legendary model NF7 presented a perfect motherboard by standards of that time. The NF7 was designed by no other than Oscar Wu himself. The later following of events is well-known: ABIT lost its best designer, and introduced motherboards that were of great quality, but never the best ones, like during the golden age of the company. However, end-users gradually got used to buying all but the best motherboards, so ABIT was forced to return to the "old ways" - creating the best-quality products that find their way to the buyers by themselves. And so we received a "best" motherboard of that kind to test and review, namely - ABIT IN9 32X-MAX.
ABIT's "MAX" series of motherboards is the top series in ABIT's offer. In a large box (which is dominated by the large dragon motive) we found a very nice bundle. Alongside standard supplied cables and connectors, this package contains a Wi-Fi card, an antenna, and a couple of non-standard SLi connectors. The SLi connectors are longer than usual because the two PCI-E 16x slots are put further away from one another on this particular model, so you won't be able to use the standard connectors supplied with the graphics cards.
| Motherboard | ABIT IN9 32X MAX | | RAM | 4 x DDR2 | | Chipset | NVIDIA nForce680i | | Audio | Realtek ALC888DD 7.1 HD Audio Codec | | SATA | 6x SATA2 + 2x eSATA + 1x PATA | | LAN | 2x Realtek RTL88E1118 PHY LAN 10/100/1000 Mb/s | | RAID | Serial ATA RAID 0, 1, 10 nForce680i | | Connectors | 3x PCI Express x16, 2x PCI Express x1, 2x PCI, 10x USB 2.0, WiFi, 2x Firewire |
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Of course, you only really need one connector, the other one is a spare one. The motherboard is based on the powerful nForce 680i chipset and possesses an entire three PCI-E slots (plus the x1 ones, of course). Black slots are operating in x16 mode, and the single blue slot in x8. The layout is perfect and we have nothing to add here. The motherboard itself was dominated by the passive heatpipe cooling system which did its job more than satisfactorily, as the 680i is a chipset that can be rather hot both on nominal values and when overclocked. By mounting a simple 80 mm fan on top of the NorthBridge, any potential heating problems are void.
We hadn't even entered the BIOS, and it was already clear to us that this is an overclocker's paradise. Beside the display on the PCB that informs you about what the motherboard is doing at any given time, we were also delighted upon noticing a BIOS reset switch located on the rear panel. It is a miracle that no one remembered this before ABIT. The useful Power and Reset microswitches are present. The special attraction of the IN9 32X-MAX is the light-show it possesses. On the rear part of the PCB there are blue LEDs near every bezel, which can be set in 8 different operating modes via BIOS. The mode we found the most interesting is the one where there seems to be a blue row forming a circle around the motherboard. The LEDs can be turned off as well, of course. BIOS also has controls for all motherboard-controlled fans.
The 5-phase digital voltage unit on this mobo is fantastic - we rest sure that many overclocking records can be broken using this motherboard's BIOS with such voltage filtering. All the vital options for fine-tweaking the system are under the "μGuru" menu, and they are numerous. As the nForce 680i chipset is involved here, CPU/RAM relations can be set much more precisely, unlike on motherboards based on Intel chipsets. The RAM voltage goes from 1.8 V to 3.0 V, which is more than enough for any sort of "exhibition". The maximum processor voltage is 1.925 V, and the FSB can be set all the way up to 750 MHz. The NorthBridge voltage can be set at up to 1.55 V, and the SouthBrigde at 1.7 V. Our testing processor, a Core2Duo E6600, worked stably at 3.4 GHz on this motherboard, but with a drastically lower voltage when compared to the P965 chipset, for example - 1.36 V vs. 1.42 V. The connectors are aplenty, so no minuses in this department either.
| 1280x1024 | ABIT IN9 32X MAX | | Sandra 2007 | | | Processor | 22.106 / 15.368 | | Multimedia | 131.886 / 71.357 | | Memory | 5.698 / 5.702 | | Latency | 81 ns | | 3DMark 06 SM2 / SM3 / CPU | 3.952 / 3.788 / 2.143 | | COD2 (mediumQ) | 84.5 fps | | FarCry (mediumQ) | 194.9 fps | | Pray (mediumQ) | 109.2 fps | | Quake4 (mediumQ) | 125.3 fps | | Cinebench 9.5 | 726 | | Nuclearus 1.0 | 7,431 | | DivX 6.2.5 | 126.4 fps | | Photoshop CS2 | 44.1 sec | | WinRAR 3.6 | 1.101 KB/s |
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The only possible flaw of this motherboard is its price. Nothing else could have been expected, though, as it is maximally equipped and reliable. After surpassing this flaw, i.e. buying the motherboard, all the options you will be able to set in BIOS will make sure that you forget very soon how much you paid for this ;-)
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