abit AW9D-MAX i975 Express Motherboard Review

Box Contents

• Seven SATA cables
• Single ended rounded floppy cable
• Rounded IDE cable
• SLI connector
• Toshlink optical S/PDIF cable
• Firewire and USB 2.0 PCI backplate
• Metal I/O panel
• Driver CD
• Manuals
• Installation floppy disks

When one purchases the abit AW9D MAX they made sure you get nearly everything you need to get the system up and running with just the contents in the box. Included are seven SATA cables for all the internal ports and these cables aren’t the cheap ones as they each have a clip on them to make they won’t come loose unintentionally. The floppy cable is acutally long enough to make it from the floppy drive to the bottom of the board, which is needed due to the placement of the header. The included IDE cable is round, but has a clear plastic cover and not the black cover like the floppy cable. Having both wires look the same would have been better for those with windows in their case. For audiophiles abit included the optical S/PDIF cable for use with the included AudioMAX card.

Everything in the box made sense except for one thing, the SLI bridge. Why abit included an SLI bridge is unknown, but it’s sure to cause some people to think twice about it. With the growing number of ‘hacks’ that allow SLI to run on Intel chipsets it would make sense that abit included this SLI bridge to give users the ability to run SLI if they wanted to hack it on their own.