Björn3D Gives the ABIT AA8-DuraMAX
9 out of 10 and the Bjron3D Seal of Approval

Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C., September 23th, 2004 - Björn3D; a well-known hardware review site dedicates to the enthusiast community recently took a look at ABIT's Intel LGA775 socket based motherboard with DDR II and PCI-Express support; AA8-DuraMAX Here are the highlights:

Only ABIT provides excellent cooling for the enthsiast on both of the Northbridge and Southbridge "I found the board layout to be quite good. Kudos to ABIT for including cooling on this board for both the northbridge and the southbridge. This should help keep a couple of the board's hottest spots a little cooler and help with stability. The northbridge features a unique fan/heatsink combo while the southbridge is covered by a simple heatsink. ABIT allows plenty of clearance around the CPU socket for large coolers. The retail Intel HSF fits easily."

ABIT Engineered Feature; uGuru – consisted of OC Guru, Flash Menu, Black Box and ABIT EQ. Which one is your favorite features? "ABIT's innovative µGuru technology is best described on the following web page: www.abit-usa.com/technology/uguru.php. ABIT brings these features to some of its motherboards via a hardware microchip that resides on the board. Before getting too far into testing, I decided I should check out ABIT's interesting FlashMenu utility that installed with the µGuru suite. This utility is like a WinFlash application on a lot of steroids. ABIT designed a cool looking interface that allows the user to quickly and easily update the BIOS. You can choose from a one-click LiveUpdate, a step-by-step LiveUpdate or a manual update."

Conclusion, "unique and innovative features like µGuru, which includes cool utilities like FlashMenu, BlackBOX and ABIT EQ. So, if great features, stability, good performance and a practical bundle are your thing, then the AA8 DuraMAX would suit you just fine. As with any of ABIT's enthusiast-oriented boards, you also get plenty of tweaking options and settings that should keep you busy experimenting and optimizing for hours if you so choose. Many 925X boards are quite expensive, with several being $200+, but the AA8 DuraMAX comes in at around $160, which to me seems like a fair price compared to other offerings."

Pros:
+ Great features
+ Good performance
+ Good overclocker
+ Great onboard sound (Intel HDA)
+ Nice board layout and cooling design

For the full review go here: http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=692&pageID=999

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