The box of Abit's AB9 is illustrated with a sleek train that looks like Japan's famously fast and technically impressive Shinkansen bullet train. This is a very apt image for the board, given that it's based on Intel's P965 chipset. The P965 might not be the Rolls Royce of Intel's chipsets - that honour goes to the 975X, because it has bells and whistles such as CrossFire support - but on balance, the P965 is the better chipset: fast, cost-efficient and a superior overclocker.
We've seen a couple of P965-based motherboards so far, the Asus P5B Deluxe and the Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6. The AB9 has fewer frills than both of these boards and, consequently, it's significantly cheaper.
The board has a heatpipe cooling assembly, although it's a much more modest affair than that of the Gigabyte. Due to the VRM heatsink's location, the back panel is missing crusty old connections such as serial and parallel, but this isn't too worrying. There are optical S/PDIF inputs and outputs for the board's 8-channel Intel HD Audio, along with the more usual analogue surround-sound connections, four USB 2 ports (plus two on a backplate), and a Gigabit LAN connection.
While it's always good to bump off useless legacy support in favour of more useful current connections, it's easy to get carried away. This seems to be the case with the ICH8 Southbridge. It doesn't support EIDE drives, which is Intel being hopelessly optimistic. Being more realistic, motherboard manufacturers have taken to using third-party controller chips and, with the AB9, this results in some quirks to the board's layout. An EIDE port and two S-ATA II ports run by a JMicron chip are located between the two 1x PCI-E slots and the two PCI slots, which is a long way from where the drive bays will be situated in most cases. Bizarrely, using an EIDE optical drive to install Windows resulted in constant BSODs. We've experienced this with other P965 boards, but have always sorted it by tinkering in the BIOS. With the AB9, we had to use a S-ATA optical drive to install Windows. The ICH8 (no R) doesn't support RAID, though the JMicron chip's two S-ATA II ports do.
The AB9 has only a single 16x PCI-E slot, but while the board might lack dual graphics, some aspects of its design hint at Abit's high-performance background. By default, it boots with an FSB of 272MHz instead of 266MHz. This boosted the clock speed of our Core 2 Duo E6700 test chip from 2.66GHz to 2.72GHz, and explains the AB9's high overall score at stock speeds. It posted a score of 1.86, 0.02 faster than the Asus and Gigabyte boards. Considering how easily Core 2 Duo CPUs overclock, this is a neat trick, and it didn't cause problems during testing.
Abit is really concentrating on its branding these days, and this includes the colour of the BIOS. Last month's gamer-orientated Fatal1ty AN9 32X had a red BIOS. The AB9 Pro is from Abit's mainstream uGuru line, so it has a less aggressive pink BIOS. Colour aside, it has excellent fan management that allows very fine control over all five 3-pin fan headers. You can boost the FSB to 600MHz and, for a mainstream board, the voltages are decent, with 2.3V available for DDR2 and 1.7V for the CPU. Despite not allowing us to change the multiplier of our test CPU, the AB9 was a great overclocker, stably benchmarking with a 355MHz FSB, the highest we've seen from a Core 2 Duo motherboard. This required a lot of fans to be pointed at the heatsinks and caused one of the S-ATA ports to stop working, but it yielded amazing benchmark results, pushing the board's overall Media Benchmarks score to 2.38.
CONCLUSION
Abit has made good use of its enthusiast-orientated background to produce a Core 2 Duo board that allows for excellent overclocking without a super-high price tag. The fan control is excellent too, but the board is compromised by its quirky layout and the problems we experienced with EIDE optical drives. We have a big motherboard Labs test on the way next month, but if you want a cheap Core 2 Duo board right now then the AB9 is definitely worth considering.
Author: Alex Watson
Abit AB9