abit AB9 QuadGT @ [H]

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FrgMstr

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abit AB9 QuadGT - abit’s latest Intel P965 based board, the AB9 QuadGT, touts full support for both ATI CrossFire dual card configuration and the latest quad core Intel processors. But will that be enough to ward off the other top performing P965 based boards?

The abit AB9 QuadGT is a Core 2 Quad ready enthusiast motherboard that is truly worthy of the abit legacy. It has a tremendously stable and solid build and is a motherboard that we would not hesitate to use ourselves. All but the most hardcore overclockers are going to be very satisfied with this motherboard.
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Nice review. I've been running this board for about two months now and it is hands down the best motherboard I've ever had the pleasure to own. The review used the original Bios 1.0, though Bios is now up to 1.3 and most people agree there are no major kinks and performance from Bios 1.1 on is improved with faster operation and higher stable overclocks. Thank you Kyle and Morry for reviewing this board for us!

P.S. There's a nice long thread in the [H]ardforums dedicated to this board that might serve as additional reading material after this one, though the review is very accurate up to Bios 1.0.
 
I would prefer more expansion slots and that floppy port needs to be moved. Otherwise it looks like a great board. It's nice to see something good with the abit name on it again.
 
I may be splitting hairs here but from page 1 of the review,

"the AB9 QuadGT is feature complete, requiring only an Intel LGA 775 style processor, DDR2 memory, drives, and a PSU for a working system."

As I cannot find an onboard video solution, the above setup may be challenging to use for those of us with sight! Suggest a video card be included as an essential component needed. Sorry, I've been QA testing lately. ;)
 
Dan_D said:
I would prefer more expansion slots and that floppy port needs to be moved. Otherwise it looks like a great board. It's nice to see something good with the abit name on it again.
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The solid state caps are where it is at. Those are a real welcome move that I can't wait to see on all new boards.
 
Excellent review. It's nice to see abit coming back. Like many other folk, they were my intro into overclocking.

This isn't unique to this particular review, but it would be nice to see the highest stable overclock being benchmarked alongside the other boards.

I understand that there's no guarantee of being able to achieve equivalent overclock speeds, but it would be nice to see the real world impact that the overclocked setup has on the benchmarks.

3.3GHz has *got* to impact the encoding times... :D
 
I've been looking at this board, and I like it a lot but as a first time builder I'm not sure I want to deal with all the apparent hassles of the 1.0 BIOS that it ships with.
 
Still rolling with my IT-7 Max 2 Ver2. Nice review, good to abit pulling things (hopefully) back together.
 
fattybear said:
I've been looking at this board, and I like it a lot but as a first time builder I'm not sure I want to deal with all the apparent hassles of the 1.0 BIOS that it ships with.
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I agree the 1.0 BIOS has issues, but if that's all that's holding you back, it is relatively easy to flash to the latest BIOS (just need a floppy drive & a boot disk downloaded from the web). I've been running the 1.1 BIOS since I got the board without any issues, and it has been rock solid for me.
 
Great work on the review you guys! This is the best motherboard I've used in years and it definitely deserves the attention!

Your experience pretty much mirrors my own with this board. 475 seems to be the sweet spot on the FSB, although it can gun up to 500 for suicide runs... one other thing I love about the board is how cool the chipsets stay even at the high clocks. The QuadGT is chilly compared to my old heat-spouting 680i board.
 
Can anyone tell me why there doesn't seem to be any 775 mobo's with 2x pcie 16x slots for full crossfire? They all seem to be 1 slot 16x 1 slot 4x or something along those lines. :confused:
 
Chris_B said:
Can anyone tell me why there doesn't seem to be any 775 mobo's with 2x pcie 16x slots for full crossfire? They all seem to be 1 slot 16x 1 slot 4x or something along those lines. :confused:
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Probably because the P965 Express chipset doesn't have enough PCIe lanes for such a configuration. You need the i975x chipset for a dual 8x8 configuration. There are no boards that support Crossfire that have a 16x16 lane configuration either. That's one advantage the NVIDIA chipsets currently enjoy over their competitors currently.
 
Dan_D said:
Probably because the P965 Express chipset doesn't have enough PCIe lanes for such a configuration. You need the i975x chipset for a dual 8x8 configuration. There are no boards that support Crossfire that have a 16x16 lane configuration either. That's one advantage the NVIDIA chipsets currently enjoy over their competitors currently.
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The Nvidia chipsets certainly do offer a great number of features, which (I imagine) explains the 680i's higher power usage and heat output. The upcoming Intel X38 chipset is slated to offer dual x16 PCIe, is it not?
 
Chris_B said:
Can anyone tell me why there doesn't seem to be any 775 mobo's with 2x pcie 16x slots for full crossfire? They all seem to be 1 slot 16x 1 slot 4x or something along those lines. :confused:
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x38 chipset in July should address that. :D
 
Pepsiennis said:
The Nvidia chipsets certainly do offer a great number of features, which (I imagine) explains the 680i's higher power usage and heat output. The upcoming Intel X38 chipset is slated to offer dual x16 PCIe, is it not?
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Not sure. I haven't worked with one nor have I seen anything official on it.
 
What a coincidence, I just installed this board. I love it so far. Did you guys use the 1.1 BIOS update? Supposedly you're more likely to hit high FSB speeds with it. Best part: you can use uGuru to update the BIOS in Windows with one click.
 
Dan_D said:
Probably because the P965 Express chipset doesn't have enough PCIe lanes for such a configuration. You need the i975x chipset for a dual 8x8 configuration. There are no boards that support Crossfire that have a 16x16 lane configuration either. That's one advantage the NVIDIA chipsets currently enjoy over their competitors currently.
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Yeah, but show me one benchmark anywhere, ever, that showed 16x PCIe making any difference at all over standard 8x lanes, including 8800 SLI. Hasn't happened.
 
Dan_D said:
I would prefer more expansion slots and that floppy port needs to be moved. Otherwise it looks like a great board. It's nice to see something good with the abit name on it again.
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Agreed. I have found that expansion slot layout is the most limiting factor when I buy a motherboard. This is another one of the many motherboards I would like to have, but can't buy because it doesn't have the right number and type of usable expansion slot.
 
I don't really get the fuss over the floppy port. I actually really like the placement of it. They include a nice long ribbon cable, and you can easily route it discreetly along the back or sides of your case. Here's my setup. I use a TJ09, so the placement of the FDD port actually allowed for some really neat wiring. You can hardly notice the FDD cable:

picturem.jpg



As for the layouts of the expansion ports, I think you'd be hard-pressed to improve on this design. In the last month I went through a 650i and two 680i boards trying to find a board I liked, and this is hands-down the winner. Plus it's purdy. :D
 
littledoc said:
Yeah, but show me one benchmark anywhere, ever, that showed 16x PCIe making any difference at all over standard 8x lanes, including 8800 SLI. Hasn't happened.
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I didn't say it made any difference in actual game performance. It is however a feature that NVIDIA has and Intel lacks.
 
littledoc said:
I don't really get the fuss over the floppy port. I actually really like the placement of it. They include a nice long ribbon cable, and you can easily route it discreetly along the back or sides of your case. Here's my setup. I use a TJ09, so the placement of the FDD port actually allowed for some really neat wiring. You can hardly notice the FDD cable:

http://physicaledge-pt.com/picturem.jpg


As for the layouts of the expansion ports, I think you'd be hard-pressed to improve on this design. In the last month I went through a 650i and two 680i boards trying to find a board I liked, and this is hands-down the winner. Plus it's purdy. :D
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I don't even use a floppy drive so I don't care about its placement. I don't understand why they still have floppy ports on them. The BIOS can easily emulate a floppy on boot using a flash drive or just use a USB floppy if you have to. The problem is that I need 2 useable PCI-E and 1 PCI slot. If I stick my 8800 in there it will eat up the first PCI-E slot since the fan sits basically against the 3rd slot. That would leave me with not enough slots. I have 2 PCI-E TV tuners. The only board I found that meets all my needs was the Asus P5E Deluxe, because my 8800 eats up 2 worthless PCI slots leaving the PCI-E slots free.

I really think they could of stuck a x1 slot above the x16 slot. The board would have been much more versatile then. In my perfect world this board wouldn't have any PCI slot at all and they would have stuck a x4 and another x1 slot on there.
 
brom42 said:
I don't even use a floppy drive so I don't care about its placement. I don't understand why they still have floppy ports on them. The BIOS can easily emulate a floppy on boot using a flash drive or just use a USB floppy if you have to. The problem is that I need 2 useable PCI-E and 1 PCI slot. If I stick my 8800 in there it will eat up the first PCI-E slot since the fan sits basically against the 3rd slot. That would leave me with not enough slots. I have 2 PCI-E TV tuners. The only board I found that meets all my needs was the Asus P5E Deluxe, because my 8800 eats up 2 worthless PCI slots leaving the PCI-E slots free.

I really think they could of stuck a x1 slot above the x16 slot. The board would have been much more versatile then. In my perfect world this board wouldn't have any PCI slot at all and they would have stuck a x4 and another x1 slot on there.
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I like it when they place the PCIe x1 slot above the primary PCIe x16 slot. Seems like good use of space to me.
 
THEnumber337 said:
Here is an article on PCI-Express Scaling. It's a fairly interesting read.
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That's a fascinating read actually. It does make a case for needing dual x16 PCIe slots. Eventually with SLI 2.0 we might need three or four full speed x16 slots if that information is correct.
 
As an earlier poster stated, only having 2 PCI slots is dissappointing. I hadn't seen this trend till I ordered an HP pc for my lab, and was shocked that it only had 2 expansion slots, and one was filled with the card reader option already! I had to order their PCI extender card to fit everything in.

Now, most people may not need 2 or more video capture cards and a secondary audio card and data acquisition card, but I hope manus like abit keep making boards with the option to include them!

High-quality low esr can caps are a welcome sight, hopefully they will lengthen the life of the system to at least what we enjoyed in the early 90s before the crappy import caps that are used on most comps in the last 7 years became commonplace.
 
I've had this board running 24/7 for 8 days now and love it. This board is so easy to oc and all the settings from the uguru gui are applied to the bios.........makes overclocking so easy that even girls can do it :)
I'm surprised the review didn't give more details about the blue leds under the board. They really add that extra cosmetic "wow" and go well with the blue board itself. This was an added bonus I didn't know about until I actually got the board, and I have a blue them going on with my rig.

To littledoc: Nice picture but maybe post one without the ccfl's turned on. I have a similar setup but waiting on some blue pentosin to replace the old green antifreeze before I throw my board into the water loop.
 
Pretty thorough review so well done - just a shame that the boards been out for over 6 months before you tested it.
I'm also a bit surprised that I didn't see any mention that it stays on the 1067 strap when overclocked past 400fsb unlike most other 965s which switch to the looser 1333?
 
Buff, I'll ask you as you've spent more time with this board than many of us, but the question is to anyone running this board: After flashing to 1.1 Bios, I felt there was more responsiveness to the system, especially once in Vista, and benchmarks rose a hair. Do you feel there is an improvement in speed (however small) with the later 1.1 or 1.3 Bios?
 
I think you ( [H] ) guys are a little confused by the surface mount integrated inductor package just above the CPU socket, or fell victim to marketing techno-speak. This board uses "normal" modern mosfet pwm Vreg down circuitry. It is controlled by a digital pwm controller chip, as are most if not all new boards. The small digital pwm chip is near the backplate i/o. The mosfets are under the heatpipe finned portion just south of the pwm chip. Moving south we find the long ceramic surface mount intergrated inductor package. Then the small surface mounted caps then the socket. It is a good quality Vreg. but nothing of particular note in an enthusiast board.

Good board, but alas, not sure its a worthy successor to the NF7-S legacy, (probally not see something that innovative ever again :( ) the DQ6's additional phases on the Vreg was one of the primary reasons I went with it. I wish I had the cool fan/temp setting in the bios, thats pretty neat.

A couple of suggestions for future reviews.

Customer/tech support (imo) is now one of the major factors in my choosing a new board.
I like to know:
Does the manuf have its own support forum.
Are manuf tech people present in that forum.
Do bios updates have notes that give litte, more, or very detailed information as to what changed in a bios release.
Warranty length.

I have found the above to be a major factor in "customer experience" with a new board just from helping people in the forums. If the above is excellent people tend to be happy with the product even if it is not the worlds best overclocker, because they can get help. If the above is lacking, major fustration sets in when a problem occurs. Funny how some manuf do not realize a few bucks spent in those areas go so far in customer satisfaction and repeat business. Because my NF7-s was (still is !) so good, I looked hard at this board when the time came to upgrade but (just like right now) I could not get Abits web site to load. They lost a sale.
 
Pepsiennis said:
Buff, I'll ask you as you've spent more time with this board than many of us, but the question is to anyone running this board: After flashing to 1.1 Bios, I felt there was more responsiveness to the system, especially once in Vista, and benchmarks rose a hair. Do you feel there is an improvement in speed (however small) with the later 1.1 or 1.3 Bios?
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couldn't say as I'm still running B02 (does all that i need it to) & I don't have Vista (now that my beta is expired).

BillParrish said:
Good board, but alas, not sure its a worthy successor to the NF7-S legacy,
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I would put it up there with the NF7-S V2.0.
1 of the things that I loved about that mobo (& my AN8 Ultra) was it's reliability/stability & lack of vices - the QuadGT has that too.

the DQ6's additional phases on the Vreg was one of the primary reasons I went with it.
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ah but as I'm sure that you know the no. of phases alone isn't necessarily a promise of better. Again it can be just a marketing ploy.
I wish I had the cool fan/temp setting in the bios, thats pretty neat.
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I had a 965-DS4 & 1 of the reasons that I changed was that I missed uGuru - Gigabytes fan/hardware control & monitoring was pretty basic in comparison plus far fewer fan headers.


Customer/tech support (imo) is now one of the major factors in my choosing a new board.
I like to know:
Does the manuf have its own support forum. In abit's case, yes.
Are manuf tech people present in that forum. very rarely in my experience of several mobo mfrs forums
Click to expand...

I have found the above to be a major factor in "customer experience" with a new board just from helping people in the forums. If the above is excellent people tend to be happy with the product even if it is not the worlds best overclocker, because they can get help. If the above is lacking, major fustration sets in when a problem occurs. Funny how some manuf do not realize a few bucks spent in those areas go so far in customer satisfaction and repeat business. Because my NF7-s was (still is !) so good, I looked hard at this board when the time came to upgrade but (just like right now) I could not get Abits web site to load. They lost a sale.
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Imo abit are better than most (esp. Asus) however the fact that abit USA has it's own website/server is both a benefit (2 sources of downloads/info - USA & Taiwan) & a curse (esp. as at the moment when they haven't replaced their webmaster).
 
BillParrish said:
I think that's one area where abit needs to improve. They do have a forum with some good people over there to help out (I have noticed Buff over there helping out), but they do have problems with their servers. Quite often it takes me 2 or 3 tries to get a page to load on their site. Not a deal breaker but it does get annoying at times.

Overall I'm still very impressed with this board. It doesn't have all the extra ram tweaks that the dfi boards do, but it's also not as finicky as them either. If you have a cpu with an 8x or higher multi and are looking for a user friendly, easy to overclock board then the quadgt should be on your very short list of mobos to look at.
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its nice to see abit begin to right the ship on the enthusiast front. the last time i had an abit board that overclocked well was the old via powered av8. since then i've used fatality versions of the an8 and an9 and have found them to be feature rich but not particularly great overclockers. back when i was fiddling with the av8, getting a cheap winchester to clock at or above 2.4ghz was a pretty big accomplishment.
 
SpoogeMonkey said:
They do have a forum with some good people over there to help out (I have noticed Buff over there helping out), but they do have problems with their servers. Quite often it takes me 2 or 3 tries to get a page to load on their site. Not a deal breaker but it does get annoying at times.
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tbh that's really only relatively recent - basically since abit USA got rid of their webmaster & haven't replaced him.
 
I really like my AB9 Pro. The FSB scaling is the biggest limitation. Most sites that tested the board using the later BIOS found it to top off around 360-375MHz It's an older board and passively cooled so it's not too bad for pairing with an E4300 or E4400.
 
I thought that with the later BIOS the AB9 Pro was good for middling 400s (& I know a few have got over 500fsb)?
 
The AB9 Pro was one of the worst boards I've reviewed in recent memory. It wasn't all bad, but I couldn't recommend it.

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTIwMCwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

Pink BIOS, poor overclocking, and it wasn't stable at stock speeds which really bothers me. Those are just some of the reasons why we didn't like it.

The AB9 Quad GT on the other hand really seems like a step in the right direction for abit.
 
Dan_D said:
The AB9 Pro was one of the worst boards I've reviewed in recent memory. It wasn't all bad, but I couldn't recommend it.

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTIwMCwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

Pink BIOS, poor overclocking, and it wasn't stable at stock speeds which really bothers me. Those are just some of the reasons why we didn't like it.
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but others did (apart from the IDE port positioning although I have a suspicion that abit didn't really expect it to be actually used much) - again it may come down to your individual sample.

On the other hand iirc [H] was very complimentary about the Asus P5N-E SLI which I wouldn't recommend from personal experience & similarly I've seen lots of complaints about Commandos which again iirc [H] liked.
 
Dan_D said:
The AB9 Pro was one of the worst boards I've reviewed in recent memory. It wasn't all bad, but I couldn't recommend it.

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTIwMCwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

Pink BIOS, poor overclocking, and it wasn't stable at stock speeds which really bothers me. Those are just some of the reasons why we didn't like it.

The AB9 Quad GT on the other hand really seems like a step in the right direction for abit.
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The (current) BIOS released in December fixed a lot of problems on the AB9 Pro. I haven't had any problems with mine since I got it almost 2 months ago. Overclocking isn't that great compared to newer boards, but mine can do a little over 370MHz if I drop the CPU multiplier. My E4300 is the limiting factor at the stock multiplier.
 
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