Verdict: Lots of overclocking potential at a great price

We first saw the AB9 last month and were very impressed by its low price and excellent overclocking potential.

The AB9 is based on Intel's latest core logic chipset, the P965. The AB9 only has one 16x PCI-E slot, so it doesn't support CrossFire or two-card SLI. However, you could always buy a GeForce 7950 GX2 if you felt the need for a dual-GPU graphics card.

Two 1x PCI-E slots are positioned next to the 16x PCI-E slot, closely followed by two PCI slots. This is a sensible arrangement, as a dual-slot graphics cards will block access to the near-useless 1x PCI-E slots, rather than the precious PCI slots. We're less impressed by the placement of the EIDE port and two RAID-capable S-ATA II ports provided by the JMicron JMB363 controller between the PCI and 1x PCI-E slots. This means that EIDE and S-ATA cables will have to snake across the motherboard to reach your drives. As the Southbridge is the basic ICH8, not the ICH8R, the four main S-ATA II ports don't support RAID.

The AB9 also lacks FireWire, although it has eight USB 2 ports and support for 8-channel Intel HD Audio. The VRMs and Southbridge are fitted with small heatsinks, but the heat from the Northbridge is moved away by a heatpipe that connects to a large heatsink near the I/O ports at the back of the board.

The default BIOS settings of the AB9 pre-overclocks the FSB to run at 272MHz instead of 266MHz (with a Core 2 Duo CPU installed), which is just enough to give it an edge in all of the benchmarks we ran on it.

For manual overclocking, you can raise the vcore to 1.7V, the RAM to 2.3V and the Northbridge to 1.45V. Using a combination of these settings, we boosted the FSB from 272 to 355MHz. This is an amazing overclock that enabled the AB9 to deliver superlative performance in every benchmark.

The AB9 is a great P965 motherboard and definitely worth shortlisting. However, if you can afford it, then the Asus P5B Deluxe WiFi-AP is an even better overclocker, and has more RAID-capable S-ATA II ports, plus integrated wireless LAN and CrossFire support.

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• Headphones - 12th September 2008
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• PSUs - 14th July 2008

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