Retail Abit IN9 32X-MAX - Pictures, observations and testing...

[Johnny Bravo]

Abits foray into the nVidia 680i ring comes in the form of the IN9 32X-MAX, part of the MAX range of enthusiast orientated motherboards. Being reviewed is the wifi version of the board coming with it's own pci-e dongle included in the package.

So first up, a few pictures of the packaging and box contents:





BIG box! Colourful with some sorta robo-ninja-dragon, whatever floats yer boat. You'll also see a sturdy carry handle and that the box itself has a lid allowing you to peer in, and see the wifi gear, SLi slots and digital PWM heatsink.


Opening the box presents you with yet another box with a clear plastic lid over it (theres ALOT of packaging) protecting the motherboard, wifi card and twin SLi bridges.







Pulling this box out you find another two smaller boxes housing the driver CD manuals etc, and all your free cables:




We can see that there is the usual CD and IO backplate, but Abit has also included a few other bits. See the big mental thing in the bag? Thats a PCI blanking plate with a bracket on it to clamp down your SLi bridges! the Smaller bag contains little clips to allow you to fasten your own 40mm fan to the northbridge for OC purposes. Nice little touches I thought!



Heres the cable selection that you get. One rounded floppy cable, one optical cable, one 4 way USB bracket, one rounded IDE cable and 6 SATA cables!



The IDE cable is also colour coded

[erwinz]

very nice.. waiting for your results..

[Kabauterman]

*sabber*

will have this too

damn nice

[Johnny Bravo]

A closer look at the motherboard

Just a collection of shot of the board as I built it up tried to cover a number of angles here hope you like.








The following are a few details I wanna show about the board

Good ol' Crucial Anniversary RAM - sturdy stuff


The NB heatsink has the Abit logo stamped on all the fins


Detail of above


Power and reset switches on board, very handy for desk benching


The green and red LEDs are for 5v and 3.3v check and the blue is an on board power on status.

These are a few pics of the power circuitry for the northbridge/VTT /SB components I'm hoping to figure out vmods for them sometime as the circuit itself is pretty straight forward.

The marked inductors are where to measure the respective voltages, from the underside of the board. VTT is bang on what uguru reports. NB is reported 20mV low and SB is 40mV. Vddr is spot on with with both uguru and the BIOS settings themselves. Vcore is 10mV out from uguru ( about 5mV lower than the BIOS setting) and drops a further 10mV under load (ORTHOS cpu stresstest). Digital VRM has really good control over the voltage.


The Winbond W83320G Synchronous Buck Regulator of the choice of controllers for all these voltages. Feedback is on pin 8 and is a simple resistor divider circuit. Vmods should not be too challenging.


I've included this to show the basic layout of a PWM Buck circuit I just liked the fact it was laid out exactly in line with the operation and gee well I just visually like that sorta thing damnit!


A shot fo the nVidia 680i core. Abit has chosen to use thermal pads on the heatsinks, I wasn't to taken by this idea and replaced the thermal pad for the NB with some ceramique to hopefully improve temps/FSB clocks. The heatsink is pretty heavy and has a machined surface on the underside that isn't overly smooth. I have not confirmed if it is indeed some form of copper or painted aluminium.

[Xptweaker]

Nice .... OC results and northbridge temps would be nice ^^

[Johnny Bravo]

Initial Observations

The board is stable
Abit were a little late getting this out of the house compared with other manufacturers thought it looks like it was due to them taking some time over it. There are a bunch of new technologies on this board including the digital VRM and they have been executed very well.

The board is overclocking friendly
Release BIOS is good, clear and offers a wealth of settings without overwhelming the user. Uguru is on hand and offer straightforward overclocking settings and voltage ranges. I did feel a little constricted by some of the voltage ranges i.e. VTT and NB but as for vddr and vcore you'll have killed your hardware long before you've run out of volts. Vddr also features ref voltage adjustments too which will help with memory tweaking. BIOS also allows for saving of profiles. Recovery from failed boot has never been easier!!! Clear CMOS switch at back is a great touch and works well. Onboard jumper still exists too. BIOS is usually able to reboot on last known settings if you push too hard. HINT if is doesn't press the RESET button and wait till the BIOS readout goes from "A0" -> something else. Then hold the power button, wait about 5 secs and reboot, the BIOS should reload the last working settings and allow you to regain control again. Has worked flawlessly for me

Board is feature rich
Lots of goodies onboard no real point in going over them here as you can just as easily read it off Abits site but here's a few of them:

• Digital VRM
• Solid State Capacitors
• Wi-Fi PCI-E card
• HD 7.1 audio with HDMI connector
• 6 SATA with additional 2 eSATA connectors on the backplate
• firewire
• Silent operation (no overclocking mind!)
• The clear CMOS switch
• The board has embedded blue LEDs on the underside with trippy lighshow settings

[Johnny Bravo]

Testing Results

Testing the board is a mixed bag. For the majority of the time it's pretty straight forward to use and you can overclock with a fair amount of ease.

However

There are times that it will really annoy. The whole divider issue is one such problem and you will find that you come across "gaps" in the overclocking ability of this board. I recommend that you always push higher, say 10MHz more and see if it's still not working. When I was trying to find the max FSB this became quite a problem and alot of time needs to be dedicated into mapping these holes out for a given divider/strap.

So on with the show....

Test Setup
CPU - E6700
memory - Crucial anniversary 2x1048MB
VGA - ATi 7000 PCI
HDD - WD Raptor 74MB
Cooling - Stock Intel fan

Clean XP install used along with CD Drivers, full nVidia driver suite installed

Maxing the board

Max CPU Speed



Voltages are given on screen, remember this is an Intel stock cooler, not the best cooler out there. I surmise that with a better cooler 4GHz should be feasible at 1.6volts spi32M stable

Max Memory Speed



Very happy with this as it's currently fastest on the 600MHz table What makes it even better is that the RAM voltage is only 2.4v so there's room for improvement. I doubt this is as far as it'll go but just wanted to post this for now.

Max FSB so far


http://valid.x86-secret.com/show_oc?id=157262

This is still a work in progress, I'm starting to understand the board better now so hope to break 500MHz shortly and beyond. Things get hot at these temperatures and a fair bit of tweaking is needed still.

1T vs 2T

The following are just a few images of testing I did seeing how 1T affects performance in comparison to 2T.







Performance at 650Mhz

Finally a few pics of read/latency performance at a high FSB, don't ask me why I didn't do test at 660MHz I forgot and dialled in the wrong speed





I will at some stage get round to BIOS photos being taken and uploaded too.

What else do folk wanna know about it?

[Pete]

Yay a Uk mobo reviewer...look forward to this

[day187]

Mine is on order should be here by weekend, so johnny on with the show

[shawn1998]

I plan on getting this board, but it looks as if I'll have to get different coolers for the north and southbridge chips. The heatpipe probably won't work very well if I run it upside down.

Can you tell me how far apart the mounting holes are for the northbridge? The southbridge looks fairly standard, but the nb looks a bit different.

Thanks.

Shawn

[day187]

I would also like to know this as i looking at getting the Swiftech MCW30

[\/ENDE][A]

Picked my board up today . Will start my build later in week, benchies and pics to follow.
@ Johnny-Bravo what are default volts for mem at start up, reason i ask i will be using CellShocks PC8000C5 5,5,5,15 2.1v-2.2v and wondered if it was set @ 1.8v.

[noobzed]

everyone say , i have the mobo, and i'll do some benchies and so on, nobody post concrete things...

[Johnny Bravo]

doing stock now, might do a few OC on air getting the watercooling sorted tomorrow and maybe a bit of phase for the weekend....

[noobzed]

so post air cooling, have you SLi issue or SATA issue, how hot NB is when fanless ?

we are all waiting for u !

[bro20000]

Is this board anybetter for ocing than the evga 680i and reference nvidia boards!

[dinges]

good stuff so far johnny

cant wait to see some fsb action

[Johnny Bravo]

I'm sorry for the delay guys I know your all desparatly seeking alot of answers. At the moment my girlfriend and I are going through alot and it's just a little draining after talking for several hours to come home and start alot of benching. I've got today off tho so willl be getting a few things published.

Just to warn you though:

• I will not be doing RAID as I have no second raptor drive
• No SLi testing, I don't have even one PCI-E card atm
• I will not have all the answers as there's ALOT of settings so it'll take some time to find what works best

Sorry if this disappoints but there will be other reviews that hopefully will cover these topics.

Cheers

John

[Cranox]

Can u test vdroop ( vcore set in bios 1.5v or something , then look how much it is idle an stressed )

[Johnny Bravo]

Can u test vdroop ( vcore set in bios 1.5v or something , then look how much it is idle an stressed )

already posted mate see above in photos

The marked inductors are where to measure the respective voltages, from the underside of the board. VTT is bang on what uguru reports. NB is reported 20mV low and SB is 40mV. Vddr is spot on with with both uguru and the BIOS settings themselves. Vcore is 10mV out from uguru ( about 5mV lower than the BIOS setting) and drops a further 10mV under load (ORTHOS cpu stresstest). Digital VRM has really good control over the voltage.

[Johnny Bravo]

Picked my board up today . Will start my build later in week, benchies and pics to follow.
@ Johnny-Bravo what are default volts for mem at start up, reason i ask i will be using CellShocks PC8000C5 5,5,5,15 2.1v-2.2v and wondered if it was set @ 1.8v.

Stock volts are 1.8v for the DDR2 but I suspect that it will not be a problem as your memory will prob not boot at PC8000 at the beginning anyway. Also the board supports nVidia EPP which I *think* cellshock have embedded

[day187]

My items have come this morning

3x xclio (Green Led) 120mm fans (Stacker 830)
2X Silverstone FN121 120mm fans (for water-cooling radiator)
1X Corsair Memory cooler
1X Abit IN9-MAX
1X Abit Guru clock panel

[Xptweaker]

Nice dude nice .... when can we expect results ?

[Johnny Bravo]

Just a thought...

A few of you have been asking about mounting holes dimensions and what not. I'd like to point out that while I've been benching on air at about 1.6v the temps on the 5 phases has been in the region of 60-70oC. Now while you all may be eager to rip off the heatpipe section You will NOT be able to run the digital VRM naked. It's a simple enough heatsink design to fix this but it will still need to be made and installed before you run you water cooling etc....

[day187]

almost done just making a raid fllopy disk then installing windows xp 64.