Hexus' review of Abit AB9 Pro

[bwlonsdale]

Just wanted to add a couple comments as an ex-owner of the board. I bought it when it first came out in the UK and it had an early BIOS, so some of this may have been fixed since. I ended up having to RMA it back to Scan.

I bought the board to use in my existing HTPC setup, so the first issue was a complete showstopper for me.

If you put the board into standby and resume, the onboard sound stops working. This makes the board useless as a HTPC unless you invest in a soundcard. For me it wasn't an option as I used two PCI tv tuner cards, leaving nothing free. I raised a support call with Abit who ignored me for a couple weeks and then eventually got back after some chasing to simply tell me to wait for BIOS update which may fix it (thanks a bunch btw...). I also raised a support request with Realtek who were more helpful, giving me some programs to take log dumps before and after the resume but couldn't provide a solution either, ending up in the RMA.

I've read the release notes for the latest BIOS and it says memory compatability fixes - this was one area the board needed serious improvement. At the time, it was impossible to fix the board to any other memory speed than what was read from the SPD. I had bought some Corsair DDR2-800 memory and the board insisted on reading the SPD timing for DDR667. At the time there were ZERO options for configuring the memory. Subsequent BIOS's helped by introducing very limited timing adjustments but didn't cure a lot of compatabilty issues for people, so be wary of what memory you put into it.

The board failed to complete SuperPi regularly at stock speeds. I used the XStremesystems version (1.4). It finished Prime95 burnin fine, so could be more an issue for SuperPi than the board.

To get NCQ working on the board requires putting the controller into AHCI mode. However...this results in a lot of problems with the hard drives. The AHCI BIOS screen showed all my hard drives as showing SMART errors (there is nothing wrong with them!). This results in delays to the boot process by up to a minute as it scans each drive before proceeding to boot.

It'd be interesting to see if Hexus reviewer can verify any of these problems still exists.

[ABIT Max]

Dear Abit Mickey & Sean:
can you both look at the issue he mentioned,and test with our new BIOS to see it can be solved or not

thx

[Hidden Hippo]

I'd like to add that the 1.4 BIOS, which supposedly (according to ABIT Sean) should have fixed my issues with my G. Skill NR PC2-6400 RAM, allowing it to work at 800MHz, rather than 533MHz, don't work properly in that respect.