Just ordered an Abit IN9 32X MAX

[Shark00nPT]

Hello everyone!
I'm Manuel, I live in Portugal and a few days ago I bought my very own dream machine.
I chose a P35 based motherboard, the Asus P5K Premium everyone was talking about at the time. When it arrived on the mailbox, I spent easily 30 hours assembling everything as carefully as I could, managing to keep all the cables hiden, all the components cool, and assembling a high-end CPU and VGA watercooling setup.
Problem was, the P5K Premium, excuse my english, sucked. I couldn't even install my OS, the board simply didn't boot with my 4GB of RAM (It only POSTed with 1 dimm of RAM, no matter what BIOS revision I had), I couldn't setup a RAID array, and the HD transfer rate was something in the order of 4MB/s. I sent it back and ordered a 680i based motherboard, the Abit IN9 32x MAX.

But there are some things I want to know, and that's why I'm posting here.

Will the IN9 MAX handle my 4GB of Corsair Dominator DDR2 PC2-6400 RAM nicely? With no hangs, offering full stability and performance? (It's 4 x 1024MB by the way).
Will I have no problems setting up my 2 HD RAID0 setup, and installing 3 other HDs (one for the OS, and the other two for Storage) and a SATA DVD-RW Drive?
And, should I expect a performance increase, from the P35 to the 680i? If yes, at which level?


I hope I made myself understandable, excuse my english.

Thank you very much, Manuel.

[mildlyAmused]

I've got a similar setup, IN9 and 4GB corsair 6200 RAM (mine is 2x2gb). It works fine. Make sure you flash your bios to 1.3 first, you'll regret doing otherwise. This explains how to update the bios and this thread has the address for the ftp where the new bios updates are kept. Problems I've had were mostly fixed when I eventually flashed up to 1.3. Whether your system will be stable with 4x1gb, I don't know. I went with 2x2gb so I had the option of adding another 4gb later. So far I've not had any hangs or instability with this setup.

The board has 6 SATA ports and 2 ESATA ports on the back, so you should have enough physical ports for your system. Setting up RAID didn't seem too difficult, you enable it in the bios and go on from there.

As for whether you'll see a difference between P35 and 680i, I don't know.

Hope this helps a little!

[Shark00nPT]

I've got a similar setup, IN9 and 4GB corsair 6200 RAM (mine is 2x2gb). It works fine. Make sure you flash your bios to 1.3 first, you'll regret doing otherwise. This explains how to update the bios and this thread has the address for the ftp where the new bios updates are kept. Problems I've had were mostly fixed when I eventually flashed up to 1.3. Whether your system will be stable with 4x1gb, I don't know. I went with 2x2gb so I had the option of adding another 4gb later. So far I've not had any hangs or instability with this setup.

The board has 6 SATA ports and 2 ESATA ports on the back, so you should have enough physical ports for your system. Setting up RAID didn't seem too difficult, you enable it in the bios and go on from there.

As for whether you'll see a difference between P35 and 680i, I don't know.

Hope this helps a little!

It did help.

Thanks a lot.
Just one thing, is there any BIOS newer than the 1.3? And if so, should I update?

[mildlyAmused]

1.3 is the latest for that board, there might be some betas after this but I don't think so. Best thing to do is to update to 1.3 and then stay with it. If there's something specific in 1.3xxx betas (if there are any) that fixes something you need, then upgrade. Otherwise stick to 1.3.

[Shark00nPT]

OK man thanks!
So the Abit IN9 32X MAX is the Mboard for me then? Or should I go with the IP35 PRO?

[mildlyAmused]

I wouldn't know since I have no experience with the IP35 PRO.