ABIT AW8-MAX is approved by ExtremeTech!

August 23rd, 2005 - PC ExtremeTech; one of the ZIFF Davis' online publication targets directly towards hardcore enthusiast has recently reviewed the ABIT AW8-MAX motherboard and gave it an ExtremeTech Approved award. Let's hear what ExtremeTech has to say about the ABIT AW8-MAX motherboard "If you're building a high-end Pentium 4 system and only foresee the need for a single video card, ABIT's AW8-MAX is a great choice."

ABIT engineered feature Silent OTES not only provides maximum cooling performance for the users, it also provides an absolute quiet environment. "The northbridge is passively cooled, hooked up to a large rear radiator in the back panel by a heat pipe. We really love this design—those little chipset fans can really crank out a lot of unwelcomed noise. There are some differences, however. This board has a standard FireWire jack on the back plane, and the four USB 2.0 ports are accompanied by not one, but two gigABIT Ethernet ports. You'd be surprised how handy dual Ethernet can be in ad-hoc networking situations."

ABIT AW8-MAX scores higher than the Intel 955X reference boards in most of the benchmarks. ExtremeTech was really impressed with the testing results. "The AW8-MAX actually came in fastest in the DivX encoding test, and right in the middle of the Windows Media tests. Performance of ABIT's new 955X board lies directly between the nForce 4 SLI board and Intel's own 955X solution, which posted the highest set of scores. The benchmark numbers here are all very close, and probably not worth getting worked up over. You can effectively call this a tie"

Conclusion. "If you're buying a really high-end Intel CPU, you may want to consider a motherboard based on the 955X chipset. If you decide to go that way, the ABIT AW8-MAX is a great choice. Sure it's expensive, but then so are all the other 955X boards. You get dual gigABIT Ethernet, six SATA-II ports, FireWire (even FireWire 800), and a nice integrated audio solution. We absolutely love the passive chipset cooling solution on both this board and the NI8 SLI."

Product	ABIT AW8-MAX
Company:	ABIT
Price:	US$220 (street)
Pros:	Lots of SATA-II ports; FireWire 800; dual gigABIT Ethernet; passively cooled chipset.
Cons:	Costly; only a single graphics slot.
Summary:	A stable, good-performing board that runs silent and nice features like dual gig-E, a 7.l audio daugthercard, and six SATA-II ports. If you’ll only ever use one graphics card, this is a great choice.
Rating:

For full review go here: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1851070,00.asp
For more information on ABIT AW8-MAX, go here: ABIT AW8-MAX

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