Out of the box, we get our first look at the AW8D.  The board is dominated by the Silent OTES cooling system and matching blue Mosfets.  I am immediately impressed with the openness of the design.  Nothing feels crowded together or forced, even the CPU mounting leaves plenty of room for aftermarket cooling.

     The Silent OTES system uses a combination of heat sinks and heat pipes to reduce the need for noisy active cooling.  Unlike some of the ABIT motherboards featuring DUAL OTES systems, the Silent OTES system requires no fans at all.  The resulting back ports look a little strange without the audio but ABIT has moved the audio to a riser board to make room for this innovative solution.

     The top of the AW8D shows of the MOSFET cooling and gives a better idea of the size of the heat sinks.  Here you can also see the three fan controllers located along the edge and one slightly hidden next to the 24 pin power socket.  The placement of the 4 pin power socket so close to the top edge is a welcome change as well.

     The Intel 975X chipset and LGA 775 provide support all current Socket 775 processors up to the Pentium D  965 series.  The AW8D does not support the new Conroe processors.  Check your Processor compatibility here.  The AW8D does support DDR2 in speeds up to PC2 8000 and up to 8 GB with the right operating system and is Windows Vista ready.

     The bottom of the AW8D is host to the device controllers and card slots.  You may have already noticed the AW8D has very few slots for cards.  There are two PCI-E 16x ports (8x in Crossfire mode) one PCI port , two PCI-E 1x slots and the AUDIOMAX slot.  With the AW8D, ABIT has chosen to go with a single IDE controller facing the front of the case and relocated the floppy controller to the bottom of the board.  The result is a design that benefits SATA based installs and seems to advocate the floppy to an afterthought.  As I usually only need a floppy during the initial Windows installation, this is less of a bother than I expected but some users will find the location challenging to cable.  The two fan controllers you see here bring the total to a whopping 5 plus the CPU cooler!

     From this view you can better see the layout of the rest of the ports.  The SATA ports are divided between the two Silicon Image Sil 3132 ports to the left and the four Intel ICH7R controlled ports to the right.  IEEE 1394 support is located on the back edge and can be seen as red in the above picture.  The two internal USB ports are located by the Sil 3132 ports and are colored blue. The inclusion of a POST code display is a welcome addition for both status and troubleshooting information. The odd 12 volt socket found at the lower left is used to provide auxiliary power to the PCI-E ports.  The AW8D manual states the minimum recommended power supply is a 300 Watt unit.