Motherboards
With the arrival of new motherboards that use different versions of the nVidia nForce 650/680 chipsets, older motherboards still using the Intel chips are still of high quality and have seen a significant reduction in price. This is a good occasion to look at 8 LGA775 motherboard models that could be of interest to you so that you can benefit from this price reduction.
As one of the preferred manufacturers for over clocker’s, ABIT looked like it was going to disappear much to our disappointment. Fortunately though, the worst was avoided and ABIT is still around after some internal restructuring in the company. Today we will be looking at the AW9D-Max and the AB9-Pro models.
We will firstly start with the AW9D-MAX bundle, which has an average price of 265 dollars and in our opinion seems quite complete:
The first think that jumps out at the eyes is the lack of audio input and outputs on the motherboard. The High Definition Audio solution is presented in the form of a PCI Express 1x, called AudioMax, and is based on the Realtek ALC882M chipset offering 7+1 channels.
As well as the ability of connecting the plugs to the cases façade, this “external” solution has 7 audio input/output options:
The SLI connector can perhaps be surprising, but the i975X chipset has the particularity of officially supporting the multi-GPU Crossfire system and not officially the nVidia SLI which helps you better understand its presence in the bundle.
You will discover that the specifications of the AW9D-MAX as well as the other motherboards in this comparison a little later. But we can say that it is complete and even if there is only a single PCI slot, this is all that is needed to connect the Creative X-FI sound card. For those of you that use Vista the Universal Audio Architecture condemn all hardware acceleration and audio treatment as the presence of a single PCI port is far from being annoying considering the number of USB, Firewire ports made available to us. The external RAID/S-ATA controllers are already in the PCI Express format.
- Quick installation guide
- User manual
- ABIT uGuru Guide
- Drivers CD
- S-ATA RAID drivers on Intel/Silicon Image floppy
- Connector for multi-GPU system
- 7 S-ATA cables
- 1 round floppy cable
- 1 round IDE cable
- 1 PCI adaptor with two IEEE1394 ports (with 1 mini) and two USB ports
- 1 PCI Express 1x Audio cable
- 1 Optical audio cable
The first think that jumps out at the eyes is the lack of audio input and outputs on the motherboard. The High Definition Audio solution is presented in the form of a PCI Express 1x, called AudioMax, and is based on the Realtek ALC882M chipset offering 7+1 channels.
As well as the ability of connecting the plugs to the cases façade, this “external” solution has 7 audio input/output options:
- Audio input
- Audio output
- Microphone
- S/PDIF Input/output
- Center/subwoofer
- Front surround D/G output
- Back surround D/G output
The SLI connector can perhaps be surprising, but the i975X chipset has the particularity of officially supporting the multi-GPU Crossfire system and not officially the nVidia SLI which helps you better understand its presence in the bundle.
You will discover that the specifications of the AW9D-MAX as well as the other motherboards in this comparison a little later. But we can say that it is complete and even if there is only a single PCI slot, this is all that is needed to connect the Creative X-FI sound card. For those of you that use Vista the Universal Audio Architecture condemn all hardware acceleration and audio treatment as the presence of a single PCI port is far from being annoying considering the number of USB, Firewire ports made available to us. The external RAID/S-ATA controllers are already in the PCI Express format.
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