Abit AW8-MAX v1.0
As many of you are aware, Oscar Wu, the famed BIOS writer, had left Abit to pursue his expertise elsewhere and since that point, some have questioned the quality of the BIOS and overclocking potentials of Abit motherboards. In fact, some users with the AW8 series have experienced compatibility issues with some particular sets of DDR2 RAM. We have asked Abit on any ETA for a future AW8 BIOS release to address some of these issues and at the time of writing, we haven't been officially addressed. When we attempted to overclock the Abit AW8-MAX, we were able to overclock the system past the 250-260MHz marker but pushing the FSB beyond these limits resulted in stability and performance problems. After extensive trial-and-error testing, we ended up running the system with a 240MHz FSB and with a 14x multiplier, the Pentium D 820 was running at 3.36GHz, while sticking to default CPU voltages. With the 240MHz FSB and a 3:5 CPU:DRAM ratio, our Corsair XMS2-5400UL had no troubles running at DDR2-800 speeds while at 3-4-4-8 timings and feeding it 2.0V. During our entire testing process, we had no thermal issues related to Abit’s Silent Q-OTES technology.
Hitting the bench today for this review, we'll be comparing the performance of the Abit AW8-MAX against the AW8 vanilla. If you are interested in how the AW8 (i955X) compares to that of the ASUS P5LD2 Deluxe or ASRock 775Dual-880Pro, which utilize an i945P and VIA PT880 Pro respectively, you can see our original performance numbers here. For reference, listed below are the hardware components that were tested on the AW8 and AW8-MAX, which closely correlates to the hardware used previously in the testing, as well as the software versions of various packages used during the benchmarking phase.
| Hardware Components | |
| Processor: | Pentium D 820 (2.80 GHz) |
| Motherboard: | Abit AW8-MAX |
| Memory: | 2 x 512MB Corsair XMS2-5400UL |
| Graphics Card: | Leadtek PX7800GTX 256MB |
| Hard Drives: | Seagate 7200.9 SATA2 160GB (ST3160812AS) |
| Optical Drives: | Sony DVD-RW & DVD-ROM |
| Cooling: | SilverStone NT03 |
| Case: | Chenming 901AD |
| Power Supply: | Enermax Whisper II 535W SLI |
| Software Components | |
| Operating System: | FedoraCore4 |
| Linux Kernel: | 2.6.14-1.1637 |
| GCC (GNU Compiler): | 4.0.0 |
| Graphics Driver: | NVIDIA 1.0-7676 |
| Xorg: | 6.8.2 |
Luckily, as both boards are closely related and we have experienced no Linux compatibility troubles, we are pleased to note that there were no complications during the benchmarking process unlike the NVIDIA troubles that had come about with some motherboards upon Intel's Pentium D launch. After a fresh install of Red Hat's FedoraCore4, and updating the available packages, Linux had no troubles detecting the various hardware components on the AW8-MAX. Everything from the Broadcom NetLink BCM5789 dual LAN controllers to the Abit AudioMAX was properly detected and operational. For benchmarking today, we have our traditional slew of Phoronix Linux motherboard benchmarks - Doom 3, Hdparm, Gzip, LAME, BlueSailSoftware Opstone Sparse-Vector Scalar Product and Opstone Singular Value Decomposition, and FreeBench. In addition, we have appended Quake 4 to our platter of motherboard benchmarks. As well as running the AW8-MAX and AW8 at stock speeds for the CPU and memory, we also performed the same set of benchmarks while the AW8-MAX was overclocked to its 3.36GHz Pentium D 820 and DDR2-800MHz @ 3-4-4-8 values that we had attained from the overclocking section of this article.