AB9-Pro Dream Machine on a Budget - FastSilicon.com

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AB9-Pro Dream Machine on a Budget

Article Index
AB9-Pro Dream Machine on a Budget
Intels E6300 CPU
The AB9 Pro
The AB9 Pro Continued
Choosing Components
Benchmarks
The Finished Build
Conclusion

Page 4 of 8

The AB9-Pro Continued

In recent history, Abit has gone from the enthusiasts' choice, to a lackluster mainboard company. This has let other companies, particularly DFI move in. However, with their recent acquisition by USI, Abit may very well be on the road to comeback. We were impressed with their current Core 2 mainboards and made the choice to go with the AB9-Pro for our budget dream machine. Although the AB9-Pro has recently been under fire for purported overclocking issues, we had no such problems and after much research into P965 motherboards, feel we've found a solid performing champ.

The AB9-Pro from Abit is certainly one of the most inexpensive P965 feature packed motherboards to sport the ICH8R south bridge, and thus is the perfect choice for our budget dream machine. Most mainboards in its price range, like the Gigabyte GA-965P-S3 we recently reviewed, don't use ICH8R south bridge. Instead, these lower end boards use the ICH8, as a result lacking RAID south bridge support, native command queuing, and AHCI. The AB9-Pro was designed by an individual from USI, and not the original Abit engineers that made the company infamous. The GA-965P-S3 was in our test lab during this article and is indeed an excellent overclocker, but feature wise, was lacking.

The layout of the AB9-Pro is very interesting to say the least. In between the last PCIE-1x slot and the first PCI slot, the JMB363 powered PATA connector is found. We had to use an extra long IDE cable in order to connect our optical drive. Another way around this problem is to put the optical drive in the lowest drive bay. There are also two SATA ports above the PATA connector powered by the JMicron JMB363 as well; however with thin SATA cables wiring around this odd placement is possible. The floppy connector is also in a bad location at the bottom left of the motherboard. The mainboard doesn't have a second PCIE-16x slot for CrossFire, and when you're on a budget, this won't be an issue.

With the P965 chipsets lack of PATA support, it's common to find JMicron chips used for PATA devices.

More on the JMB363:

JMB363 is a single chip, one-lane PCI Express to two-port Serial ATA II and one-port PATA Host Controller. The JMB363 is designed to provide two-port SATA II and one-port PATA connectivity. The JMB363 supports both AHCI and Legacy IDE controller to increase system feasibility, including Native Command Queuing (NCQ), Hot Plugging, ATAPI Device Supporting, Port Multiplier with Command-based Switching Supporting, Programmable Output Swing Control to fit SATA II Gen1m and Gen2m (External SATA Connection, eSATA). It features PCI Express bus and Serial ATA II interface to express high performance storage devices.

Some mainboard vendors also include a PATA to SATA adapter for hard drives/optical drives. Although the AB9-Pro provides support for up to nine SATA drives, we don't see how one would be able to use all of them unless SATA optical drives start shipping soon. Thus the problems with SATA connector placement are a non-issue because to the bottom right of the board we find six SATA connectors powered by the ICH8R. Here is where one should connect hard disks, and the ICH8R supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 1+0, and JBOD. There is one external e-SATA plug powered the Silicon Image 3132 chip which may come in handy. The SATA connector above the PCI-16x slot is powered by the same Silicon Image 3132 chip. We feel these three extra SATA connectors are for show, and show is something we like.

One can see the AB9-Pro's elaborate OTES cooling system. With its heatpipe design, it cools the MCH and VRM passively. There are also other blue heatsinks around the CPU socket area cooling the five phase VRM or voltage regulation module. For overclocking and longevity, Abit has also including a great deal of solid state capacitors around the CPU socket area, and high quality capacitors around important areas of the motherboard from Rubycon and Okaya Electric Industries. There is much room around the CPU socket area for aftermarket cooling solutions. To that end, the south bridge is also cooled by a passive blue heatsink.

The ATX 24-pin power connector and 4-pin auxiliary power connector are placed where they should be, at the edges of the motherboard. Above the PCI-16x slot one finds a 4-pin molex connector used to supply power to a graphics card if needed. We suggest connecting the molex connector to be safe when using a higher end video card. There are five fan plugs total, three on the right side of the board, one at the bottom of the board, and one near the CPU socket. There is another fan plug for the CPU cooler. There is an audio connector to the upper left side of the board, three blue USB connectors next to the six SATA ports, and the firewire connectors are located to the bottom edge of the board.

To the rear I/0 section of the board we find two PS/2 ports, four USB ports, two LAN ports powered by the RTL8168 Gigabit PCI-E chipset, and six audio ports powered buy the ALC 882D HD codec for superb build in audio (configured for 2, 4, 6, and 8-channel audio). There are also two S/PDIF ports and the e-SATA plug.

One may be wondering at this point why the layout of this motherboard is a bit off-kilter. Our contact at Abit told us some of the weird placement issues were done to provide stability and have good trace layouts for the capacitors. However as seen in our ECS PX1 preview, layouts can be done correctly with feature packed P965 motherboards, but the AB9-Pro is slightly more feature packed than the PX1. We won't give Abit any grief as they've produced one solid overclocking, feature packed, monster of a motherboard for around $145.00USD. There may also be a learning curve going on, as USI did design this motherboard.

BIOS and uGuru

The AB9-Pro's software bundle includes flashmenu, Blackbox, and our favorite for Windows based overclocking, Uguru. With Abit's Uguru chip you can basically do everything you would do in the BIOS on the desktop. In Windows, using Uguru you can change the FSB, adjust memory settings, adjust fan speeds and fan header voltages, CPU voltages, board voltages, set warning temperatures, and monitor every aspect of the system just to name the main features.

The board uses the Phoinex Award BIOS and for testing, we flashed to the latest 1.5 Beta BIOS. Before we talk about the BIOS features, we must warn the reader of the pink BIOS used. We almost took a double take when the board was first shipped, thinking maybe the PR folks were playing a joke. But after talking with Abit, the AB9-Pro's BIOS is indeed pink. At least my girlfriend liked it.

The BIOS sports all the features one will need for overclocking. Advanced memory timing settings are lacking, but this shouldn’t be a concern for most. One can adjust the CPU V-core up to 1.7250v. The North Bridge can be tweaked up to 1.45v, while the memory can be set up to 2.30v. In our Beta BIOS, the max FSB allowed was 600MHz, which is quite impressive and leaves much head room. The M/B strap can be changed, thus making different memory clock ratios possible. All in all, the BIOS isn’t spectacular, but is certainly sufficient for the average overclocker.

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