The moment we’ve all been waiting for is here. Unfortunately we didn’t have access to a comparable Core 2 Duo board at the time of the review so we can only compare the board to its overclocked self. We have also thrown quite a few "real world" testing procedures in with the usual mix of Pcmark and Sisoft Sandra.

The test rig:
Intel Core 2 Duo 6600: 2.4ghz [FSB 272]
Corsair 2x1GB TWIN2X2048-6400 DDR2 5-5-5-12
Abit AW9D-Max
ATI X800 Pro
Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic 7.1
Antec NeoHE 550watt PSU
ZALMAN CNPS9500
Windows XP Professional SP2

Overclocking is something we would like to make a big point on here. While Intel’s great chip design led us to a painless CPU overclock of +1ghz we hit a brick wall after that in terms of stability. No amount of breaking in/stressing, or bios voltage increases could get us any further and still be stable. By some standards these clocks are impressive, but there are others who have easily hit 400fsb - this is however not a fault of the Abit Motherboard but the other hardware within this particular system. My colleague Stuart "Veridian3" Davidson will be putting this board through its paces shortly in a roundup article with much higher end hardware in the mix, so we will be able to see FSB limitations with an unlocked extreme edition processor on Vapochill. With both of these reviews you will see how the motherboard will perform with an "everyday" priced enthusiast system (the review today) and an extremely expensive high end gaming system.

Overclocked Settings for this review:
CPU: 3.42ghz [380FSB]
CPU/Memory Ratio: 1:1
Memory Timings: 4-3-3-10