Abit AB9 Pro: A sneak peek at Intel's new P965 chipset
by Gary Key on July 3, 2006 3:45 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Test Systems
All three boards we're including in the benchmarks support current socket 775 Intel processors, and the Abit AB9 Pro and NVIDIA 590 SLI Intel Edition will fully support the Intel Core 2 Duo processors upon release. We did our benchmarking with the Pentium D 805 processor but will follow up shortly with the Pentium 950D and 955XE benchmarks once we receive our production release BIOS. The Abit AB9 Pro fully supported our E6300, E6600, and X6800 Core 2 Duo processors, but we cannot provide results at this time due to NDA restrictions.
A 2GB memory configuration is now standard in the AT test bed as most enthusiasts are currently purchasing this amount of memory. We chose memory from Corsair that would offer a wide range of memory settings during our stock and overclocked test runs. Our memory timings are set based upon determining the best memory bandwidth via MemTest 86 and our test application results for the Asus and NVIDIA boards. Our current beta level Abit BIOS locked the memory timings at 5-5-5-12 so we also tested the Asus board at this setting in order to provide a fair comparison.
All other components in our test configurations are exactly the same with the boards being set up in their default configurations. Our video tests are run at 1280x1024 resolution for this article at standard settings. We will not report on 1600x1200 4xAA/8xAF single and SLI until we have a production ready BIOS to review. This holds true for the balance of our Networking, Storage System, and Audio benchmarks.
All three boards we're including in the benchmarks support current socket 775 Intel processors, and the Abit AB9 Pro and NVIDIA 590 SLI Intel Edition will fully support the Intel Core 2 Duo processors upon release. We did our benchmarking with the Pentium D 805 processor but will follow up shortly with the Pentium 950D and 955XE benchmarks once we receive our production release BIOS. The Abit AB9 Pro fully supported our E6300, E6600, and X6800 Core 2 Duo processors, but we cannot provide results at this time due to NDA restrictions.
| Test Systems | |
| Processor: | Intel Pentium D 805 |
| RAM: | 2 x 1GB Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C3 |
| RAM Settings: | 5-5-5-12 533MHZ, 2.100V - Abit 3-2-2-8 533MHZ, 2.250V - Asus/NVIDIA |
| OS Hard Drive: | 1 x WD Raptor 74GB 7200 RPM SATA (8MB Buffer) |
| System Platform Drivers: | NVIDIA Platform Driver - 9.35 Intel Platform Driver - 8.0.1.1002 |
| Video Card: | 1 x EVGA 7900GTX (PCI Express) for all tests |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA nForce 91.31 WHQL |
| Optical Drive: | BenQ DW1640 |
| Cooling: | Retail Intel HSF |
| Power Supply: | OCZ GamexStream 700W |
| Case: | Gigabyte 3D Aurora |
| Operating System: | Windows XP Professional SP2 |
| Motherboards: | Abit AB9 Pro NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI Intel Edition Asus P5WD2-E Premium |
A 2GB memory configuration is now standard in the AT test bed as most enthusiasts are currently purchasing this amount of memory. We chose memory from Corsair that would offer a wide range of memory settings during our stock and overclocked test runs. Our memory timings are set based upon determining the best memory bandwidth via MemTest 86 and our test application results for the Asus and NVIDIA boards. Our current beta level Abit BIOS locked the memory timings at 5-5-5-12 so we also tested the Asus board at this setting in order to provide a fair comparison.
All other components in our test configurations are exactly the same with the boards being set up in their default configurations. Our video tests are run at 1280x1024 resolution for this article at standard settings. We will not report on 1600x1200 4xAA/8xAF single and SLI until we have a production ready BIOS to review. This holds true for the balance of our Networking, Storage System, and Audio benchmarks.
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Anemone - Monday, July 3, 2006 - link
Yes this is quite interesting, thank you very much Anand and Gary!Things are heating up and getting very interesting. As the windup to Conroe gets underway a lot of folks are out buying mobo's now. I want to see more testing first, not really being yet committed more to the 975 or the 590. Have to be honest and say the 590 is proving to be more than I thought it was, but that's a good thing.
Thus I'm taking all this information in, and am grateful for your previews!
Calin - Monday, July 3, 2006 - link
If the supply of Conroe processors will be much lower than the demand, one can expect the mainboard prices to decrease - if the supply of mainboards will be much higher than the supply of retail Conroe processors. So, buying mainboards in advance might prove a not so good idea.mine - Monday, July 3, 2006 - link
most interesting reading of the last 4 weeksthis 965 vs. 975
thanks anand