Abit AW8

The Abit IC7-MAX3 was not only one of the best Canterwood (i875P) motherboards we've ever seen for features and overclocking abilities, but it also brought to the table Abit's OTES (Outside Thermal Exhaust System) Technology. In the IC7-MAX3 implementation of OTES, it actively cooled the MOSFETs with a small fan on the I/O panel. Since this premiere, we've seen several other revisions of Abit's OTES Technology with such things as OTES RAM Flow and Dual OTES. Abit's latest OTES implementation, Silent OTES (Q-OTES), can be currently found on such boards as the AW8/AW8-MAX and AN8-SLI/AN8-ULTRA. We first reported on Silent OTES while at Computex Taipei this year and now we finally have our hands on this new cooling technology with the arrival of the Abit AW8. In addition to the single heatpipe that runs from the Northbridge to the I/O panel, this motherboard features Intel's current flagship Chipset, the i955X, Abit's uGuru, and AudioMAX Technology.

Features:

Processor
· Designed for Intel® Pentium® 4 / Pentium® D LGA775 processors with 1066/800MHz FSB
· Supports Intel® Hyper-Threading / XD-bit / EM64T / EIST Technology

Chipset
· Intel® 955X / Intel® ICH7R Express Chipset

Memory
· Four 240-pin DIMM sockets
· Supports Dual channel DDR2-667/533 Un-buffered Non-ECC memory
· Supports maximum memory capacity up to 8GB

PCI-Ex16 Graphics
· Delivers up to 8GB/s per direction for 3.5 times more bandwidth than AGP 8x

PCI-E Gigabit LAN
· On board PCI-E Gigabit LAN controller supports 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet

SATAII 3G RAID
· Intel® Matrix Storage Technology supports RAID 0/1/5/10
· Supports SATA AHCI, providing native command queuing and native hot plug

Audio (Dolby Master Studio support)
· ABIT AudioMAX HD 7.1 channels Intel® High Definition Audio with Dolby Master Studio
· Supports auto jack sensing and optical S/PDIF In/Out

ABIT Engineered
· ABIT uGuru 2005 Technology (ABIT OC Guru / ABIT EQ / ABIT Flash Menu / ABIT Black Box)
· ABIT CPU ThermalGuard Technology
· ABIT AudioMAX HD 7.1 Technology

Dimension
· ATX form factor 305 x 245mm

Contents:

The Abit AW8, like previous Abit motherboards, arrived in a very extravagant looking package. On all sides of the box was useful information in addition to some artwork. Inside of the container, we found plenty of functionality with their useful package design of keeping all of the different contents separated to prevent damage during shipping. In addition to the motherboard, the following components came bundled with the retail packaging - one Abit AudioMAX daughter card, one rounded IDE cable, one rounded FDD cable, four SATA cables, one SATA power adapter, one I/O shield, Abit AW8 user's manual and quick installation guide, Abit uGuru user manual, one SATA RAID driver disk, and a CD which contained various Abit utilities and drivers; all of which software are Microsoft Windows binaries.