Overclock3D.Net :: Print Page :: Abit IN9 32x Max Intel Socket 775 Motherboard

With a rather bizarre horse/dragon/cyborg covered in flames the box certainly is very striking and large. The top panel flips up to reveal parts of the motherboard that highlight features. The packaging is certainly large enough to withstand a bit of a beating and will catch most people's attention when on retail shelves. Some rather amusing "beast" references are plastered over the box but all of the relevant information is there for you to read about the board.

abit use compartments to store the huge amount of extras you get with the board. As you can see included are two extra-long SLI connectors and abit's PCI-e Wi-Fi card. All in all a very well organised box.

Package

The box includes a plethora of stuff for you to use with the board. In fact I was quite overwhelmed when I took a look inside those neat little white boxes.

Here's what abit have put in the box for you:

* 1 x abit "AirPace" PCI-E x1 WiFi card
* 2 x Extra-long SLI connectors
* PCI backplate bracket to secure SLI bridge connectors (see below)
* Fan mount for NorthBridge
* I/O backplate
* 6 SATA data cables
* Rounded clear IDE cable
* Rounded Black FDD cable
* PCI backplate with 2 x USB and 2 x Firewire connecters (1 x large, 1 x small)
* 1 x Digital Optical audio cable
* 1 x AirPace manual
* 1 x abit IN9 32x Max Manual
* 1 x µGuru Users Manual
* 1 x abit IN9 32x Max Motherboard Jumper Settings quick-reference sheet
* 1 x Driver & Utilities CD for abit IN9 32x Max

The IN9 Max is an expensive top-end motherboard and a good bundle is expected. However I feel that abit have gone past the call of duty and this really is a complete package. I'm sure there's something else I would have wanted to see, but I can't think what it is!

On a more serious note, it's good to see abit stacking up this board with all that an enthusiast needs. It makes you feel that your money is well spent, so good job abit.

The board has high-quality solid Japanese capacitors throughout, great for stability.

The DDR2 slots are far enough away from the CPU area that you should be able to get a rather large heatsink and tall DDR2 on-board without too much hassle. Here we also see one of the power phases, a couple of 90° and standard SATA ports and the ATX 24pin power connector all at the edge of the board.

As we move on to the socket area we notice that the board has excellent clearance. The only slightly tight part of the board is around the PWM heatsink where very large coolers may possibly butt up against the boards heatsink. All in all I would say most cooling configurations should easily fit on the board with no problems.

Here we see that abit have chosen to go with three PCI-e slots along with a couple of PCI-e x1 slots and 2 PCI slots too. This is certainly squeezing in a lot onto a board and gives the consumer a good deal of choice. The inclusion of the PCI-e x1 WiFi card means that that top slot need not go unused, good news for those who are into their Wireless. Once again we see that abit has taken every care to get everything in the right position at the edge of the board.

An onboard power and reset switch has been chosen for the board, meaning that those into benchmarking out of the case will be very happy. The µGuru external panel is supported on the IN9 Max, although sadly not included. Also note that the CMOS battery is in a great place for those times when the board really doesn't want to reset...not that I have had to use it at all on this board, which is a very good thing.

Above are a couple of gratuitious shots of the motherboard showcasing the µGuru chip and the 90° SATA connectors, as well as the standard CMOS reset jumper on the far left of the second picture.

Another excellent feature of the board is the "EZ CMOS" reset switch. The board actually usually allows you to reboot straight into the BIOS to change settings if you've found a bad overclock, but this CMOS switch on the rear I/O panel is a lifesaver. No more opening the case up and having a fun time fiddling around with a small jumper: power down totally and flick this switch and the CMOS memory gets reset. This is a great feature and yes: it does actually work.

Board setup final thoughts

The board is incredibly well laid out and it's hard to list any of the very minor niggles with layout I found as an actual problem. I think that abit have done an incredible job with the IN9 32x Max board layout which will be very hard to match indeed.

With:

* PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports
* SP-Dif Optical Connector
* 5.1 analogue sound outputs
* Dual nVidia Gigabit LAN ports
* 4 x USB 2.0 Ports
* 2 x eSATA ports

There is a very comprehensive feel about the IO panel on the IN9 32x Max.

Coming onto the onboard Audio: it is very good. abit include a high-def 7.1 audio chip supporting DTS and Dolby Digital Live. Notice also that a HDMI motherboard audio header is included on the board. The audio is good quality, although enthusiasts are likely to go for a discrete solution still.

Add to this the "EZ CMOS" reset switch and you have a very complete backplate lineup, worthy of a top end board like this.

BIOS

The BIOS on the abit IN9 32x Max is very comprehensive in it's options. The enthusiast is certainly catered for 100% with a plethora of FSB, memory and voltage adjustment. It is based on the Phoenix Award BIOS.

As the BIOS is so comprehensive I will give a brief rundown of what's on offer as far as extra BIOS features.

Memory Timings

The memory timings on offer are pretty decent. With the normal 4 timings easily changeable, abit have added a couple of extras:

As ou can see: setting manual means that you can set tCL (CAS), tRCD, tRP and tRAS as well as setting 1T or 2T for the Command Per Clock. There's a big performance boost in 1T so I would recommend using this if you can. The tRRD, tRC, tWR, tWTR and tREF are also changeable.

Overclocking Adjustments

abit provide a superb range of overclocking adjustments in their µGuru Utility in the BIOS.

The option to link or unlink the CPU and the memory is excellent, although they do not seem to be totally independent of each other.

The option to set the Multiplier is there as standard in the BIOS and goes up a 3000MHz (quad pumped), 750 actual. I found this a bit of a pain as you have to divide it by 4 to get the actual FSB which then gets multiplied by the multiplier. However 750MHz FSB is something I haven't seen yet on any forum (I'm never one to say it will never happen).

The PCI clocks can be set separately from each other which is a great option allowing for more control over your system.

Voltage Adjustment

Almost the most important bit of an overclockers BIOS, voltage adjustment is crucial on how far a board can go.

Showing this screen on it's own is a must I feel...1.85v on the CPU is for those of us crazy enough to have some serious cooling.

3v+ on the RAM is plenty to play with and adjusting the CPU VTT and SB voltage has some good adjustments too. I though abit could have given the NorthBridge voltages a little bit more as 1.6 won't be enough for extreme overclocks.

EQ and temperature monitoring

abit's µGuru provides nice temperature and voltage monitoring monitoring in the BIOS, although I am not keen on the abit µGuru panel in windows which actually read approximately 5-7°C lower than CoreTemp did (a program hailed by overclockers as the best software temperature program).

That aside there is plenty of fan adjustment to be done in the BIOS and will keep you happy should you want your fans throttle in the BIOS.

It's also worth noting that the blue flashing lights that light up the area beneath the board can also be changed in the BIOS, allowing 5 settings and off...which is nice if it annoys you.

Specification (from abit's website)

# CPU
Designed for Intel LGA775 processors with 1333MHz FSB
Support Intel Core 2 Quad, Core 2 Duo & Extreme Edition, Pentium® D & Pentium®4 Processors

# 5-phase Digital PWM Designation provides high quality and efficient power

# Chipset Nvidia® nForce 680i SLI / NF590 SLI

# Memory
4 X 240-pin DIMM sockets support max. memory capacity 32GB
Supports Dual channel DDR2 800 Un-buffered / ECC or Non-ECC memory

# Graphics Two PCI-Express X16 slots support NVIDIA® Scalable Link Interface(SLI)

# LAN Dual NVIDIA® Gigabit Ethernet
# Timing and TCP/IP acceleration
# Audio
On board 7.1 CH HD Audio CODEC
Supports Jack Sensing and S/PDIF In/Out
HDMI^TM ready header (SPDIF header)

# Expansion Slots 2 x PCI-E X16, 1 x PCI-EX16(X8 bandwidth for X4, X8 and X16 devices), 1 x PCI-EX1, 2 x PC I
Internal I/O 1 x Floppy port, 1 x ATA 133 connector,
6 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors
3 x USB 2.0 headers, 2 x IEEE1394 headers
1 x FP-Audio header; 1x HDMI^TM header

# Quick Power & Reset Button

# Back Panel I/O 1 x PS/2 Keyboard, 1 x PS/2 Mouse
S/P DIF Out and IN, Clear CMOS switch
4 x USB 2.0, 2 x RJ-45 LAN,
2 x eSATA

# Serial ATA NVIDIA® 680i SLI: 6 x SATA 3Gb/s supports NVIDIA MediaShield RAID with SATA RAID 0/1/0+1/5 and JBOD
Silicon Image Sil3132: Support 2 ports eSATA

# IEEE 1394 Supports 2 Ports IEEE 1394 at 400Mb/s transfer rate
# Form Factor ATX form factor 305 x 245mm
# PCB Color: Black

# abit Engineered abit µGuru^TM Technology
abit Silent OTES^TM Technology
100% Japan capacitors
100% Low ESR and high ripple conductive polymer aluminum solid capacitor
Digital PWM
EZ switch for Clearing the CMOS
On-board LED Lighting

Board Setup

After installation and on first boot everything worked fine with no problems. Having taken a look around some forums it seems that this may be because both sets of RAM that I tested on the board are designed to run at low voltages and boot at 1.7v and above. However in my case the setup worked excellently and I had no issues booting properley when I setup the board.

For testing I setup a RAID 0 array on the board as a secondary array to the SATA primary OS drive and this also worked fine. I haven't had a change to test eSATA yet though.

Testing Setup and Notes

The following test setup was as following:

Core2Duo E6700 ES
abit IN9 32x Max Motherboard
1gb Mushkin HP2 6400 (4-4-4-10)
Sapphire X1600Pro
Hitachia Deskstar 7K160 SATA HDD
Sony DVD-Rom/CD-RW
Silverstone 560w ZEUS PSU
Silverstone TJ09 case

Note that to test that users would not have an issue with 8800 and 8800 SLI use on the board I also installed 1/2 8800GTS overclocked editions. No issues were found.

For comparison I used results from an earlier review by OC3D on the Intel D975XBX, the Abit AB9 Review, the AW9D max Review and the Asus P5B-E Plus Review

Testing

To test the motherboard I first ran it at stock using as stress test comprising of Orthos (dual Prime95), Folding @ Home running on both cores (set to idle priority) and RTHDRIBL running 1/2 screen. I let this run for 12hours to see how the board would fare.

The benches and tests used on the motherboard were:

Super PI 1m and 32m

SiSoft Sandra:

Processor Arithmatic
Procsssor Multemedia
Memory Bandwidth
Memory Latency

3DMark05 and 3DMark06 @ 1024 x 768 and 1280 x 1024

Counter Strike Source @ 1024 x 768 and 1280 x 1024

HD Tach

Cinebench:

CPU Rendering
OpenGL

For comparison I used the following:

- Silverstone Zeus 560w PSU
- XFX 7900GT GPU
- Kingston HyperX PC2-8500 (5-5-5-15)
- Stock Intel Cooler
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66ghz)