Retail Abit IN9 32X-MAX - Pictures, observations and testing...

[Flanno]

I have had a different experience and maybe it is because I have not overclocked my cpu yet, as am waiting for 40mm fan. (shame they did not provide it).

But... For me... not 1 stability issue with this mobo. It works fine. The fan control is great, no sound or performance problems in sli or with 1 G80, no sata problems, no strange bios codes appearing, memory works at specced 2.2V at 4,4,4,12,2T,1000mhz or 4,4,4,12,1T,880mhz (have not tested with slacker timings), booted first time, everytime and did not have to worry about my memory being an issue first time I booted (some 680i boards had problems with Cellshock I think). And from what I have read not being able to plug a molex into the 4pin aux connector on the mobo (2nd G80 blocking it) is not a problem as this is only needed for pci-e cards which don't have their own dedicated power (according to one of the psu experts over on jonnyguruforums). Only thing I need is a bios update and 40mm fan so I can up the multiplier and get overclocking. Shame the multiplier is locked for quads. I also have not been able to test Raid as I don't have a 2nd Raptor, but early reports say it's up to scratch.

Overall I am happy - I have run Orthos while DivX encoding. No bsods. Played Rainbow Vegas, Oblivion, Quake4, Medieval 2. No problems at all. CPU seems to idle in mid to high 40's but doesn't go much higher in gaming, and only Orthos increases the temp significantly but not over 70 degrees. (same as evga then). Running everything at stock volts except memory at 2.2v. G80's are running at 660/1060 with no problem. Have not bothered with Ntune except to overclock the cards, as I hear it's a POS. Just using Abit uGuru to control fans and keep an eye on temps.

There are only 2 minor things worth mentioning at this stage :

In bios - I have to enable usb keyboard/mouse to be controlled by bios instead of os if I want to boot my OS CD or Ghost recover CD. No big deal.

The airpace wifi card gives problems. When I do a cold boot or if I go into standby and resume, xp seems to loose my airpace wifi adaptor...no sign of it in devicemanager. 1 reboot later and it's back. Can reproduce 100% of the time. Tried my trusty Netgear usb wifi adaptor..no issue. Tried an asus wifi pci card...no issue.

I noticed you said video performance was terrible with 1 G80...I tested with that first and found it the same as my Bad Axe 2. Games played fine, and with a gpu overclock to 600/1000 was getting 12.6k in 3dmark06 which I consider decent. Overclocked to 3.3ghz it would yield closer to 13.4k with 1 gpu. Add another few thousand for sli.

[Johnny Bravo]

WARNING!!!

DO NOT REPLACE PWM THERMAL PAD WITH A PASTE!

The heatsink does not mount flush with the ICs underneath and requires the pad to "fill the gap" thermal paste will actually prove less efficient in thermal conductivity in this situation!

See here for an explanation.....http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...=1#post1965334

[adamsleath]

A few more observations on this board from another user

1. I am using an X6800 chip, and niether the shipping bios nor the 11 beta bios allow upward adjustment of the multiplier (by the way, Johnny Bravo - thanks a lot for posting that bios on XS)

2. I couldn't get a stable FSB above 425 no matter what I did with the voltages (Johnny, your 495 is impressive, can you let us know what settings you used to get there).

3. Using a single 8800 GTX card, the video performance was horrible, no matter what I did with Linkboost or the Nvidia GPU ex option in the bios.

4. I started getting disk corruption errors after an hour or so of playing with the board, and without pushing the memory too far.

I also have the EVGA 680i board, and my experience with this Abit board feels just like the EVGA board when it first came out - at every turn I feel like I need a better bios. Given that Abit have been later to market with this, I expected it to be much more stable and a better FSB overclocker straight off the bat, but it isn't. After a month or so of bios revisions, I can run rock solid stable at 465 FSB on the EVGA board, and have gone back to that for now. This Abit board feels like it has potential, but for me the bios is letting it down.

One final observation. Abit's failure to include the 40X40X10 fan you need to stick on the Northbridge when overclocking is, in my view, unforgiveably cheap given the price point of this board. Abit - you should be embarassed about that!!

DISK CORRUPTION ERRORS!!!!!!!!!!!!