Abit AW8-MAX Tyldesley

The Abit AW8-MAX has an illustrious pedigree. So illustrious, in fact, that it's a direct descendant of the IC7-MAX 3 motherboard that was used in one incarnation of our very own Beat The Office PC. That's all well and good, but it means that the new MAX has a lot to live up to, in terms of both design and features. Also, in keeping with the family tradition, it should be able to overclock to a pretty sick level.

The AW8-MAX gets off to a flying start, with layout that's neat, tidy and uncluttered. The use of passive cooling for the high-end Intel 955X Northbridge helps to achieve this, and instead of a chunky fan, there's simply a thin heatpipe that shifts heat directly to a radiator situated on the back panel. The ICH7R Southbridge has a much more basic heatsink to cool it, but it's no slouch in terms of features, as it enables you to get the most from NCQ S-ATA II hard disks.

The rest of the board's ports are what you'd expect from a high-end 955X motherboard, sweetened with the little extras that overclockers like. There are four DDR2 RAM sockets, which support up to 8GB of DDR2, a single EIDE port, six S-ATA II plugs, a floppy drive connection, two bog-standard PCI slots, a single 16x PCI-E slot and two 1x PCI slots.

There's also a proprietary AudioMAX slot for the supplied daughterboard that handles the on-board 7.1 surround sound. The AW8-MAX uses the Realtek ALC882M codec and supports Intel HD Audio. It's also been given the Dolby Master Studio seal of approval, thanks to its low signal-to-noise ratio, and supports Dolby's techniques for simulating surround sound from conventional stereo speakers. This means that the AW8-MAX should be nice and friendly with a Dolby Digital decoder, especially since there's an optical S/PDIF out port, although if you're serious about audio then a dedicated sound card would be better.

Granted, none of this screams 'Overclock me!', but one feature that does hint at the AW8-MAX's potential for overclocking is its provision for fans. In addition to the 4-pin connection for the CPU HSF, there are a mighty six 3-pin fan headers free - enough connections to enable you to rig up a PC as a makeshift wind tunnel, with some to spare. You get the sense from the sheer number of fan connections that the board's designers want you to overclock as far and as fast as you can.

The back panel of the AW8-MAX is fairly uncluttered. The audio daughterboard holds all the sound connections, while the radiator squeezes out all but two LAN, four USB 2 and two PS/2 ports.

The AW8-MAX is compatible with the new version of the uGuru clock. This will set you back about £15, but it's a handy external LCD panel that hooks up to the motherboard and provides all sorts of useful functions.

There's a USB 2 port, microphone and headphone jacks, and a display that shows a range of fan speeds and temperatures. You can use it to switch between pre-defined overclocking profiles, for which you can set the fan and clock speeds.

The display will also let you know if you have an MSN message waiting or if there's an incoming Skype VoIP phone call. This is particularly handy if you're gaming, as it means you can consciously ignore people who try to interrupt your game, rather than simply being unaware of them.

PERFORMANCE

Performance is what the MAX name has always been about, and the AW8-MAX certainly doesn't disappoint in this respect. Abit has a cheeky habit of tweaking the default FSB speed from a flat 200MHz to 204MHz, so the board is overclocked by default.

At stock speeds, our new test CPU, the 3GHz Pentium D 830, found our revised benchmarks challenging. Considering that our reference PC is a 2.8GHz Pentium D 820, it isn't surprising that the AW8-MAX's scores aren't much higher.

Anyway, enough of standard speeds. As Roxette used to say, don't bore us, get to the chorus. The AW8-MAX's BIOS allows you to increase the FSB from 200MHz to 400MHz, although, unless you're rich and extravagant enough to have bought a 3.2GHz Pentium Extreme Edition 840, the multiplier will be locked. You can cram 2.3V into the RAM and, if you're feeling particularly sadistic, then you can also put 1.75V into the CPU.

The danger with overclocking Pentiums is that it causes heat problems, and sure enough, we did encounter some when we tried to put the AW8-MAX through its paces. The board ran successfully with an FSB of 260MHz, with the multiplier of our test CPU dropped to 14. This is much higher than any of the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition motherboards with dual-core CPUs that we reviewed last month. However, to get the best possible performance from the board, we ran the overclocking benchmarks at 250MHz with a multiplier of 15. This increased the speed of both CPU cores to 3.75GHz, and boosted the AW8-MAX's scores by 20 per cent in the new benchmarks. However, this required the use of three horrifically noisy fans pointed at the CPU, so we spent the day with ringing in our ears . Even better was the leap in the frame rate in Far Cry, which went from 60.4fps to 73fps.

CONCLUSION

The AW8-MAX is the performance motherboard for Intel CPUs. Over and above a 260MHz FSB, you'd really need the sort of cooling that can make snow in summer, so it's fair to say that the AW8-MAX has all the overclocking potential you'd need. Besides, if you don't have powerful cooling hardware, or if you don't want to overclock to massive FSB speeds, then the AW8-MAX isn't the board for you.

A more serious dilemma, if you do have an Intel CPU, is that while the AW8-MAX will run rings around all of the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition boards that we've seen, it doesn't support SLI. If you can afford a GeForce 7800 GTX then this might not bother you, but a motherboard is for life, not just for Christmas, and the lack of SLI limits its potential.

If you can cope with the lack of SLI support then the AW8-MAX will run a dual-core Intel CPU in the way nature intended: faster than hell, and hotter too. It's the perfect board for the overclocker who craves performance.

Author: Phil Hartup

Abit AW8-MAX