abit AW9D-Max Motherboard Review :: AW9D Max Layout

Abit decided to cool the Northbridge and Southbridge with a heatpipe cooling system. The Southbridge has a heatsink on top of it, with a heatpipe leading to the back plate. The Southbridge also has a heatpipe leading to the back plate heatsink. Abit calls their heat pipe solution Silent OTES (Outside Thermal Exhaust System) as there are no fans cooling the chipset.

Southbridge

Heatpipe

Northbridge

Dual Heatpipes

Rear heatsink

Max heatsink

Capacitors

8-pin power

24-pin power

Capacitors and MOSFET heatsinks

The CPU area is free and clear of obstacles, meaning that after-market CPU coolers can be used without much hassle. There are heatsinks on the MOSFETs, keeping them cool. The 8-pin EPS12V power connector is near the memory slots, meaning that the cable can be routed directly from the PSU. The 24-pin power connector is on the bottom row of the motherboard, where it should be. One issue I have with many motherboards are that they put the floppy controller on the far end of the board, meaning full-tower ATX cases have a hard time finding a FDD cable long enough. Abit has placed the FDD connector in this position, but fortunately included a long FDD cable with their bundle.

Front Panel IO

LED

Winbond and Sysfan

Molex and AudioMAX riser

abit color-coded the Front Panel IO and labeled each one so that you don't get confused where to put the connectors. A LED is also on the board, meaning that if the board has a problem, the error given points out to the likely suspect for the problem. Two USB headers brings the total supported by the board to 8, short of the 10 that the 975X chipset supports. There are two headers for IEEE-1394 brackets on the board. One thing about the layout that I dislike is the placement of SATA 5,6,7, as unless you have extraordinarily long SATA cables (not included in the package), or the HDDs are close to the bottom of the case, you'll need to buy cables to use them. abit included Power and Reset buttons, allowing the user to turn the computer on outside a case.