ABIT AW8-MAX layout and features
ABIT's attempt to fill the board with high-end features doesn't leave much free PCB space. ABIT has gone to some lengths to prioritise board cooling.
The hot-running MOSFETs around the CPU area are all cooled by a set of 4 heatsinks, although unlike the Fatal1ty series of boards, ABIT doesn't implement any fan-based cooling. It's kind of hard to ignore the AW8-MAX's northbridge cooling, so let's skip right to it.
Motherboard manufacturers usually have to decide between mounting a noisy 40mm fan, albeit one that can sometimes controlled via BIOS software, or use a large heatsink. ABIT's Silent OTES system reaches a happy medium between enthusiast overclocking and quiteness by using a heatpipe-cooled northbridge. It makes a deal of sense as a number of midrange video cards are now being silently cooled via the same approach. The lengthy heatpipe hooks up to a radiator-like section which is located on the top-right of the board. It should, in theory, be better than the average oversized, fanless heatsink found on most models. It will be interesting to see just how well the Silent OTES system works when northbridge voltage and speeds are increased. ABIT also adds in what it terms OC strips on the back of the PCB, with an eye to increasing heat dissipation.
The OTES system's heatpipe has been designed not to interfere with the mounting of CPU coolers, and, thankfully, the socket area is easily accessible, making installation a cinch.
Moving on down to the near side, ABIT packs in both the 24-pin and 4-pin power connectors within easy reach of the system PSU. You can see 3 out of 6 available fan headers on the board. The i955X chipset runs with DDR2 memory at varying frequencies depending upon manufacturer. ABIT plays it safe by affording official support to DDR2-667 RAM with LGA775 CPUs running at 200MHz. Of course, being an i955X board, the AW8-MAX also supports the few 266MHz FSB Extreme Edition processors, too.
Common to this trio of motherboards is Intel's ICH7R southbridge, replete with 4 on-chip SATA2 ports, high-def, audio, and copious amounts of USB 2.0 connectivity. ABIT carries over a few of its better features from other deluxe models. The large ASIC just below the 4 SATA2 ports is ABIT's µGuru monitoring/tweaking chip. It provides a wealth of voltage/speed manipulation that you'll see on the following 2 pages. To the right is the customary big-headed clear CMOS jumper, and below that is the useful debug LED display that stops at a number or code, during the POST sequence, if something goes awry. It's also nice to see colour-coded motherboard-to-case pins, as well.
Intel's ICH7R doesn't provide support for FireWire connectivity, so each manufacturer here has to integrate ASICs themselves. Texas Instruments continues to be ABIT's high-end provider of choice, with both the company's TSB82AA2 and TSB81BA3 ASICs working in tandem to deliver 2 1394b ports and a single 1394a port.
Moving on around and past the 2 PCI slots and the backwards-facing slot that ABIT uses to add in an audio riser card, we see 2 x1 PCIe slots just below the longer x16 that's reserved for graphics cards. ABIT's Fatality motherboards concentrated on performance and overclocking before all else. The AW8-MAX, however, is a well-rounded board in most respects, including features. Adding to the 4 on-chip SATA ports are another couple run off Silicon Image's Sil3112A PCIe controller which sits to the right of the board's clock generator. Keeping the features flowing are a couple of Broadcom BCM5789 Gigabit Ethernet controllers. It's just as well that the i955X chipset supports up to 22 PCI-Express lanes.
The need to use an additional audio riser card becomes apparent as well look at the I/O section. ABIT's Silent OTES system takes up a chunk of space here, leaving room for a single FireWire port (1394a, incidentally), good ol' PS/2, and 4 USB 2.0 ports.
Intel's i955X chipset is one where partners usually show just how many goodies they can add on to their respective boards without overcomplicating layout. ABIT's done a pretty good job of both keeping up features count high and ensuring that layout and accessibility remain clean.
