Abit AW9D i975X

Performance:

To allow for a comparison against Abit's AW8 series, we had pulled out an Intel Pentium D for testing. We had compared the Abit AW9D against the AW8-MAX. When it came to overclocking, however, the Smithfield had maxed out with a FSB of 230MHz, which resulted in the system memory running at DDR2-920 and the Pentium D 820 running at 3.22GHz.

When it comes to the GNU/Linux compatibility with the motherboard, the Abit AW9D had operated fairly well with Fedora Core 6. As we had commented on with previous Abit motherboards, uGuru is one area where Abit offers no support within GNU/Linux. LM_Sensors also doesn't offer any support for the uGuru sensors. The Gigabit NIC isn't supported out-of-the-box by the stock Fedora Core 6 kernel. As mentioned during our examination, NVIDIA currently doesn't offer driver support for SLI on the Intel 975X Chipset. We had asked Abit about the lack of SLI support, and they have stated NVIDIA has kept quiet on when supportive drivers will be introduced. The benchmarks we had run with the Abit AW9D and AW8-MAX were Enemy Territory, Doom 3, HDparm, Gzip, LAME compilation, LAME encoding, FreeBench, and RAMspeed.