Since I have been using an ABIT IC7 for the last years in my main work system I was very curious if this could be another board of this caliber.
After the initial setup and realizing how amazingly fast Conroe is compared to anything else seen before I went to do some overclocking on the E6300. Unfortunately I had the expectation that I could do huge overclocks out of the box into the 500 MHz+ FSB range like on some screenshots. At first I was a bit disappointed by getting "only" 400 FSB. But after reading up on the different chipsets I quickly realized that the i975X chipset was just not designed to go that fast by Intel. So this is not really abit's fault. Still, 400 FSB would have been very impressive just a year ago.
In many of our benchmarks we see the AW9D-MAX take a small lead over the P965 based ASUS P5B Deluxe. This is because the memory controller on i975X offers better performance. Especially when you go beyond 400 MHz on the frontsidebus you see that P965 relaxes some internal timings a lot to be able to handle the speeds, which results in performance losses. These become even greater at 500 FSB. So at the end of the day you may run very high FSB but your memory speed is crippled by all the added latencies. Abit's AW9D-MAX does not experience that because i975X does not do all these timings tricks.
In my opinion the optimum choice for this board is an E6600 or faster. The E6600 has a x9 multiplier, at 400 FSB this is 3600 MHz, about what you can usually expect as the CPU's maximum overclock without using special cooling. The AW9D can go over 440 FSB if you invest a little bit of time into it, meaning it could do 440 x 9 = 3960 MHz which should be plenty until you go phase change. If this is not enough you can always get an E6700 or faster because you obviously seem to have the money.
For budget users (E6300, x7 multiplier) I would recommend a P965 motherboard, because even at 440 FSB x 7 you will be at a mere 3 GHz. Of course that is very fast too, but since you are trying to keep your costs down, you could save $80 on the motherboard as well. This does not apply if you are not looking into overclocking at all, or just want to do some overclocking, then the AW9D-MAX is an excellent choice, because it offers excellent performance and stability.
Unlike the ASUS P5W DH you won't have to do a couple of soldering mods before you have a half decent overclocking board, the AW9D-MAX works well right out of the box. The lack of COM and LPT ports may not affect most of the users, but if you have an old parallel port printer, start thinking about an upgrade plan. A bit more of a lack is that only one PCI slot is available. When you use two dual-slot video cards you even lose this single PCI slot, personally I don't think this is a major limitation, but there would have been better ways to arrange the layout to accommodate for an additional PCI slot.
I will personally use this board in my new Conroe work system that replaces my P4 Socket 478 machine.