Abit IL-90MV Motherboard

Conclusions

This seems to be a terrific motherboard if you want to assemble a high-end Viiv-compliant multimedia PC using the latest HD video connection technology available: HDMI supporting up to 1080p (1920×1080 progressive scanning). If you don’t have a HDMI-enabled display today, no problem, this motherboard comes with a HDMI-to-DVI cable and you won’t need to make any changes to your PC when you replace your display with a newer one supporting HDMI.

Add this to its two FireWire ports and you will have the perfect machine for watching and even editing HD video.

It is not only that. The audio quality is impressive, with an outstanding 103 dB signal-to-noise ratio (any number above 100 dB can be considered professional level), 24-bit quality and up to 192 kHz sampling rate, plus this motherboard comes with optical SPDIF input and output connectors soldered on it. There is one drawback, though. The input quality isn’t the same: 90 dB signal-to-noise ratio, 20-bit resolution and up to 96 kHz sampling rate. A pity.

It has Intel GMA 950 on-board graphics, which is ok for a multimedia PC, but don’t even think of running 3D games on it. This is simply not the idea of this motherboard.

The support for new generation CPUs originally targeted to notebooks (Core Duo and Core 2 Duo) is great for having a PC that produces less heat and thus produces less noise.

This motherboard is somewhat expensive. Even with all its features we think USD 161 is a little too much for a motherboard with only two SATA-150 ports (Abit should have used SATA-300) and with an audio codec that doesn’t provide the same very high quality for its audio input than it does for its audio output, preventing it from being used by state-of-the-art professional audio editing – what would be great to combine with its HDMI capability.

But we think that the user that pick this motherboard for what it is proposed to do – a high-end multimedia PC – won’t regret buying it at all.