Abit AB9 Pro: A sneak peek at Intel's new P965 chipset

Final Words

Our preview of the Abit AB9 Pro shows a board with a high level of performance potential provided the production BIOS allows tweaking of the memory settings. Abit ensures us we will have a BIOS with this capability shortly and we look forward to testing the board again with our Pentium D processors and providing Core 2 Duo results in the near future. While we did not notice any other issues with the Abit system during a rigorous test schedule, we have to state once again that the overall layout is unusual if not chaotic. While this may appeal to some, we found the location of the IDE and floppy port connectors to be very difficult to work with in our test case. These port locations required the use of long cables and the partial blockage of airflow over the CPU and memory locations, certainly not what you want with a Pentium D processor.

Our other issue is the lack of a secondary PCI-E X16 physical slot that could provide PCI-E X4 capability for an additional graphics card or other PCI-E peripherals. We feel like this would have been a better option than providing two PCI-E X1 slots -- in fact, we would like to see all motherboard manufacturers begin to only use X16 physical connectors for all PCI-E slots; there ought to be at least some cost benefit in only purchasing one type of plastic connector, though of course we're simplifying things a bit. We do commend Abit on providing Dolby Digital support via the Realtek ALC882D, dual Gigabit Ethernet controllers that use the PCI-E interface, an e-SATA port, Silent OTES system, and their impressive µGuru technology for overclocking and full system monitoring/control capabilities. We will provide a full feature list and results for networking, storage, and audio in our full review of this interesting if not funky board once our Core 2 Duo NDA expires.


This was our first experience with the Intel P965 Express chipset and even with the lack of memory settings and limited overclocking capabilities due to our early BIOS, we have to say this chipset was impressive from both a performance and stability viewpoint. This has generally been the trademark of Intel chipsets and the P965 is no different. However, the lack of official dual X8 GPU capability at this time means you will have to look elsewhere for CrossFire or SLI support. This really is a huge oversight or mistake by Intel as this chipset certainly offers very good performance across the board. Our other issue is the lack of native PATA support on the ICH8R; this is not acceptable considering the almost absolute reliance on the PATA interface for optical drives at this time. Look for additional Core 2 Duo supporting i975X, P965, and NVIDIA 590/570 SLI Intel Edition motherboard previews in the near future, along with a surprise or two from VIA and SIS.