Man, I REALLY like the passively cooled chipset... wish DFI did that in the nF4 boards...

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eh, not so impressed myself. what ABIT did looks expensive and it doesn't get the job done adequately. DFI includes temperature controlled fans in their BIOS, which makes their fans bearable. A nice thing about Nforce 3/4 boards is that you really only have one chip to cool.

Who exactly is Abit targeting with this board? Who games with Intel? A64s are cheap, nforce 4 boards are cheap, and they perform better. I realize that in the corporate world, there are people out there that only use Intel, but I figured gamers were different. I just can't see this board really being that popular.

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ASUS did it first with the "Premium" series stuff.

Kristopher

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quote:

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The superior Workstation performance demonstrated here involves two parts: the ABIT NI8 SLI coupled to the D840 EE Dual core P4. The other boards compared here feature a standard single core solution

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Wait, what? You are comparing a dual core HT enabled system with several other Intel systems using only a single core? How is this apples to apples? This makes all of the benchmarks you did worthless.

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Agreed. This is not a motherboard test.

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QFT ... what's the point in testing a new board while conveniently slipping a new processor into it as well? That's akin to "Let's compare this Accord versus this Corolla, oh and by the way, the Accord has nitrous, aftermarket shocks, aftermarket brakes, aftermarket muffler ..."

Thanks for an article that shows that dual-core is better than single-core in multi-threaded applications ... funny, I thought Anandtech did one of those articles a while back ...

-TIM

PS -- WTF is up with no Firewire on this board? Mobos less than $80 shipped have IEEE1394 connectivity for cryin' out loud ...

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Err ... well ... I tried to QFT, but apparently it didn't work? Whatever, I still agree with you guys.

-TIM

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A new Forceware was also used in the gaming tests.

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ALL tests used the exact same CPU except the Workstation test results. That means general performance, encoding, DX9, and DX8 gaming were tested on all reported platforms with the Pentium D 840EE.

The Workstation Tests were included because they were an interesting picture of a 3.6GHz single core being soundly outperformed by a 3.2GHz dual-core Pentium D. The workstation tests were meant to be an illustration, not a direct comparison.

The 3.46EE was used in some past memory tests to achieve high memory bus speeds, and the reference was only made in examing overclocked memory FSB speed records - not comparative performance.

We will make this clearer in the review, but all of the benchmarks except Worksation are definitely apples to apples tests - even down to HT being enabled in all tests.

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Thanks for clearing that up, Wesley ... here I was thinking that AT had gone off their rockers for a moment :D

-TIM

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