Overclocking the AW9D-Max gave us quite the performance boost in the Source engine-based games of Half Life 2: Episode 1 and Counter Strike: Source. An increase of slightly more than 20 FPS from the boost in our front side bus and processor speed is definitely nice, with these games being two of the most played by many of us gamers it’s a good reason to try and push our hardware just a bit more for the added performance.


As we noted in our last memory test, Oblivion should see more performance from a boost in CPU speed than memory speed and our tests here prove just that: an increase on average of 10FPS. Based on this, we can see that Oblivion is a graphics card hog as a near 1GHz overclock only gave us a 10FPS increase. Either way, a faster CPU and FSB will aid your Oblivion gaming cause.

Overclocking Summary

The Abit AW9D-Max and its numbers don’t lie. The board comes through with excellent performance, especially when overclocked. We see noticeable gaming improvements and increases in the synthetic testing areas. The AW9D-Max should hold its own against almost all the other Core 2 boards at stock, and hangs in there when it comes to overclocking. I was hoping to push past 400MHz on the FSB, but I think the lack of a 1333MHz boot strap limits how far this board will go. Hopefully, a later BIOS revision will address this and make the Max one of the premiere OC’ers of the Conroe world.