Reviving and Volt Modding an Abit AW9D-Max Motherboard

Howto by geoffrey @ 2007-01-24

The overclock ability of PC hardware is known for more then a decade now. As the market seemed to ask for more user friendly ways to overclock, manufacturers came up with ideas like dipswitches, softmodding through BIOS, asynchronous bus functions, etc. Though the risk stays the same, and once you run out of luck you might find yourself paying another $200 for replacement parts. Today we take a look on how we revived our motherboard after a failed BIOS flash, followed by supercharging it for extreme performance.


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Introduction

Introduction

I have an abit AW9D-Max lying in front of me. The owner of the board had a BIOS flash go wrong, previous bios upgrades went without a hitch, but not this one, unfortunately, it rendered his board unusable. He got in contact with abit support and they send him a new replacement BIOS chip.

The AW9D-Max features a “plug and play” bios socket, although it helps if you have the right tools to remove/install a new chip. Trying several times to get the new chip in place our friend lost his patience… pushed things to hard and then started to panic.

What you see in the photo below is a working BIOS chip forcefully pushed down into it’s hot plug socket… but in the progress part of the socket got destroyed, he only got the motherboard to boot when he pushed down onto the BIOS chip… not quite an easy position to do your daily computing in.

Madshrimps (c)


This is where I come in, let’s see if it’s fix-able. The AW9D-Max is a high end LGA 775 motherboard and worth saving:

Madshrimps (c)


  • LGA775
  • Intel® 975X
  • FSB1066
  • Dual DDR2 800
  • Dual PCI-E X16
  • 7 SATA 3G RAID
  • 1e-SATA
  • Dual Gigabit LAN - PCI-E
  • 2 IEEE1394
  • 7.1 CH HD AudioMax™
  • RoHS Compliancy
  • Silent OTES™2
  • μGuru™ Tech
  • OC Guru - AutoDrive™
  • Hardware Monitoring
  • abit EQ™
  • One Click BIOS Update
  • Auto-Detect Hardware Info
  • abit SoftMenu™
  • µGuru Clock Support
  • Solid State Capacitors - For Best Stability
  • OC Strips
  • PWM Design & Placement
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