The Tech Report says the AA8-DuraMAX stands alone as an excellent motherboard. A 271MHz FSB Overclock!

July 12, 2004 - Exploring the world of Personal Computing, The Tech Report website recently took a look at ABIT's latest AA8-DuraMax motherboard; based on the latest Intel 925X chipset. Tech Report was really impressed with the overclocking ability and the μGuru technology.

Tech Report liked the layout of the AA8-DuraMax in general "The teensy PCI Express X1 slots don't take up much real estate, and PCI Express itself simplifies board layouts by reducing pin and trace counts. Abit's designers have given the AA8 ample clearance between graphics cards and the tabs on the DDR2 DIMM slots, and the rest of the board layout is sensible, as well."

Tech Report was able to overclock the AA8-DuraMax to 271Mhz with the ABIT almighty μGuru! "I was able to overclock the AA8 even further by using the Radeon X600 XT without any video drivers installed. Skipping whatever hardware initialization the drivers do allowed me to get the AA8 to a 271MHz bus. In addition to all the BIOS-based goodness we've been discussing, the AA8 comes with Abit's full suite of μGuru software for Windows, including OC Guru for inside-the-OS overclocking and AbitEQ for hardware monitoring. Abit also includes its FlashMenu BIOS update utility, which I successfully used to update the BIOS from a file. (Apparently, though, Abit hasn't yet updated its LiveUpdate service to allow FlashMenu to download BIOS updates for the AA8.) You can read more about this software suite on this page of our KV8 Pro review. I had instant, stunning success overclocking the AA8, followed by minor failures later on. Before I overclocked the front-side bus, I tightened the AA8's memory timings from our DDR2 533 modules' stock SPD timings of 4-12-4-4 all the way down to 3-8-3-2. The AA8 ran stably with those timings, and I was able to do a full set of benchmarks that way, with memory bandwidth and latency scores much improved over the Intel D925XCV motherboard I used in our 925X Express chipset review.

Conclusion: "The AA8 stands alone as an excellent motherboard. The Abit AA8's tweaking and overclocking abilities nearly redeem the 925X chipset all by themselves. DDR2 memory starts to look like a smart idea once the front-side bus breaks the 1GHz barrier and memory clock speeds get into the 600-700MHz range. Abit's overclocking features—all the "Guru" stuff and the EQ monitoring abilities—keep getting better over time, and many of them are hard to live without once you become accustomed to having them. I expect the AA8's BIOS profiles will become one of those must-have features for me before too long. AA8 DuraMax is good enough that if I were looking to build an all-new Pentium 4-based system, I'd seriously consider choosing it as the motherboard. You'll definitely want to check into that hitting up your MasterCard for an AA8."

ABIT's Advanced Durability brings greater responsibility to the motherboard manufacturers in creating durable products with quality, reliability and stability engineered for long-term, problem-free use. All of ABIT motherboards are Advanced Durability tested and approved. ABIT looks to all motherboard makers to make a similar durability commitment to the end-user.

For the full review, go to:
http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q3/abit-aa8/index.x?pg=1

For more information on <PRODUCT>, go here:
ABIT AA8-DuraMAX

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