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Yet another Abit board is upon us in the form of the Abit IN9 32X-MAX. Of course, this has to be a enthusiasts board with ample connectivity, extensive possibility of expansion, with overclocking tweaks and tunes to both delight and surprise. Having a solid base built upon the NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI chipset (with the nForce 590 SLI south bridge) and support for Intel's' Core 2 Quad core chip we can expect, or at least hope for some serious performance.

This will be our first motherboard review to include the NVIDIA 680i chipset and needless to say, I'm kind of excited. There are a host of other manufacturers rolling out 680i based boards, a few of them being Asus with their Striker Extreme board, ECS with the PN2-SLI2+, and eVGA for their simply named NForce 680i SLI board. Rounding out the list we also have Foxconn with the N68S7AA-8EKRS2H (quite the name, or is it a part reference number?) and good old Gigabyte touting their GA-N680SLI-DQ6 board, which we will look at soon. Finally, we have BFG and the nForce 680i SLI motherboard and Biostar for the TF680i SLI Deluxe. MSI also has an 680i based board with the P6N Diamond. Whew! It's more than safe to say that I'd like to be reviewing them all (or to be owning some).

But our focus is going to be upon our Abit IN9 32X-MAX board and how this new NVIDIA chipset stacks up against its predecessors and its same socket competitors, specifically the NVIDIA nForce 500 series of chipsets, and any boards we have kicking around it may be attached to. We'll throw in some other chipsets too.

The Abit IN9 32X-MAX has taken a bit of a while to reach the hands of gamers and enthusiasts, let's hope it was worth the wait.