Bit-Tech have a quick look at one of the first Abit AW9D-MAX mobos let out in the wild. It has all of the right ingredients to become the next IC7-MAX3 - it just needs some time to mature. Here's a taster:

Due to the incredibly small amount of time (read: less than five hours) we had with this pre-production sample, we didn't have much time to spend overclocking the board. Normally, we would set aside at least six-to-twelve hours to establish a board's overclocking sweetspot. However, we did have a quick play using an Intel stock cooler to see how far we could get the board to go with a minimal amount of effort. We started with the 8x multiplier on our Core 2 Extreme X6800, and got the board running at 359MHz FSB. We were able to replicate this with the 10x multiplier too.

While this may seem a little disappointing at a first glance, there are already reports of the board doing over 450MHz FSB with a Core 2 Extreme X6800 and 460MHz FSB with a Core 2 Duo E6400. We were told by Abit that there are some kinks in the BIOS that makes the board a little fussy at times when overclocking. We are hoping that these are fixed before the board reaches retail, because 450-460MHz+ FSB on an unmodded 975X motherboard is pretty impressive.