Abit AW9D-MAX: When "Beta" MAX is a good thing

Memory Performance

Click to enlarge

We have been saying for years that the Buffered benchmark does not correlate well with real performance in applications on the same computer. For that reason, our memory bandwidth tests have always included an Unbuffered Sandra memory score. The Unbuffered result turns off the buffering schemes, and we have found the results correlate well with real-world performance as we will see shortly.

With the E6600, our Abit board offers a 5% improvement in the stock clock speed Sandra Unbuffered test and a 3% improvement in the overclock tests over the ASUS board. The ASUS board holds a small advantage in both clock settings in our latency tests which is surprising considering the Abit advantage in the Unbuffered tests.

General Performance

We also tested a couple of real world applications that typically stress the CPU, memory, and storage systems along with a synthetic test to see if the performance differences in our memory synthetic tests carry over to the desktop. Our real world application tests include activities that are common on the desktop.

Our first test was to measure the time it takes to shrink the entire Office Space DVD that was extracted with AnyDVD into a single 4.5GB DVD image utilizing Nero Recode 2. Our second test consists of utilizing Exact Audio Copy as the front end for our version 3.98a3 of LAME. We set up EAC for variable bit rate encoding, burst mode for extraction, use external program for compression, and to start the external compressor upon extraction (EAC will read the next track while LAME is working on the previous track, thus removing a potential bottleneck with the optical drive). Our test CD is INXS Greatest Hits, a one time '80s glory masterpiece containing 16 tracks totaling 606MB of songs. The results of our tests are presented in minutes/seconds with lower numbers being better.

Our third test is Cinebench 9.5 which heavily stresses the CPU subsystem while performing graphics modeling and rendering. We utilize the standard benchmark demo within the program along with the default settings. Cinebench 9.5 features two different benchmarks with one test utilizing a single core and the second test showcasing the power of multiple cores in rendering the benchmark image. The results are presented in a standardized score format with higher numbers being better.

Our fourth test is 3DMark06 which tests the graphics and CPU subsystems. The 3DMark series of benchmarks by Futuremark are among the most widely used tools for benchmark reporting and comparisons. Although the benchmarks are very useful for providing apples-to-apples comparisons across a broad array of GPU and CPU configurations, they are not a substitute for actual application and gaming benchmarks. In this sense we consider the 3DMark benchmarks to be purely synthetic in nature but still valuable for providing consistent measurements of performance. The results are presented in a standardized score format with higher numbers being better.

Click to enlarge

The performance of the Abit AW9D-MAX was very consistent and in alignment with the memory test results. We found the board to be very responsive and extremely stable during testing. In fact, if you were doing a blind box test it would have been difficult to figure out which board was performing the best. The differences in performance between the two boards are very minor but the Abit board had up to a 5% advantage in our video/audio encoding tests. This indicates to us Abit has properly optimized the processor, memory, and storage subsystems within their BIOS code. However, this is a beta BIOS and performance could change either way. We suggest waiting on the production level BIOS before drawing any absolute performance conclusions. Let's see if these results carryover into our game benchmarks.