abit AB9 QuadGT

abit is one of the better known motherboard manufacturers out of Taiwan. It along with other motherboard manufacturers like ASUS and GIGABYTE have released motherboards based upon virtually every chipset available, as they sell millions of motherboards in a month and are considered Tier-1 motherboard manufacturers. Intel is the biggest CPU and motherboard chipset manufacturer in the world.

Intel is also easily one of the largest tech companies with thousands of employees and many products that meet every portion of the market. Intel launched the 965P chipset last year to replace the 945P chipset in the mainstream. The board on the test bench today is abit's AB9 QuadGT based upon Intel's P965 chipset. The AB9 QuadGT shares a lot in common with the AB9 Pro I reviewed earlier this year, with support for Quad Core CPUs added (hence the name).

The P965 chipset supports all current Intel LGA-775 CPUs including the Core 2 CPUs like the E6700, E6600 and E4300 and the Quad Core CPUs like the QX6700. All current Intel Core CPUs use the 1066MHz FSB, but they will shortly release CPUs based upon the 1333MHz FSB. Some motherboard manufacturers have already advertised support for these CPUs, but abit has not with the AB9 QuadGT.

The AB9 QuadGT sports four DIMM (Dual In-line Memory Modules) sockets, which can hold up to 8GB of DDR2 non-ECC unbuffered memory. Some manufacturers advertise up to 32GB supported, but with the lack of memory modules larger than 2GB, this is a bit of a moot point. Further, the addition of memory above the 4GB level requires a 64-bit OS like Windows XP 64-bit, Windows Vista 64-bit or Linux.

One of the new things about the P965 chipset is the ICH8R Southbridge which controls the hard disks. The ICH8R can support up to 6 SATA devices natively, an improvement over the 4 on the ICH7R found on earlier chipsets. Also on the board are a PATA controller and a FDD controller.

Intel introduced the P965 chipset in June of last year. One of the interesting additions to this chipset is the ability to run ATI's Crossfire multi-GPU technology on it. There are two PCI Express x16 slots on the board. As the P965 chipset only has 22 PCI Express x16 lanes, meaning that the QuadGT needs to split the two lanes into x16 and x4 when running two cards in Crossfire mode.

The rear IO on this board is about the most interesting and comprehensive I've seen in a long time. abit includes a Clear CMOS switch on the rear instead of the mostly useless COM1 port found on many boards. Another interesting addition to the rear IO is two external SATA ports that are controlled by a JMB363 chip, but more on that later. Rounding out the rear IO is the RJ-45 jack for the onboard Gigabit LAN, a Fire wire port, 4 USB 2.0 ports, 6 jacks for the onboard sound and two SPDIF Out ports.