Benchmark Setup
Our abit AB9 QuadGT motherboard fully supports the current range of socket 775 Intel processors. We chose an E6300 for testing as we feel this will be a very popular Core 2 Duo CPU choice with the P965 motherboards. (Granted that many people looking at a $200+ motherboard like this abit are likely to opt for a more expensive CPU as well, but with the more budget-oriented P965 boards the choice makes sense, and we continue to use this CPU for purposes of consistency.)
A 2GB memory configuration is now standard in the AT test bed as most enthusiasts are currently purchasing this amount of memory. Our choice of DDR2-800 memory from GEIL offered a very 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 our test application results.
We are utilizing the MSI X1950XTX video card to ensure our 1280x1024 resolutions are not completely GPU bound for our motherboard test results. We did find in testing that applying a 4xAA/8xAF setting in most of today's latest games created a situation where the performance of the system starts becoming GPU limited. Our video tests are run at 1280x1024 resolution for this preview article at standard settings.
Synthetic and Application Performance
We are utilizing an abbreviated test suite for our first look at the abit AB9 QuadGT motherboard. We will present full test results in our next article that will look at new P965 boards from ASUS and Gigabyte.
At stock speeds the AB9 QuadGT motherboard posts the best WinRAR and Quake 4 scores, and it's SuperPI and Nero Recode scores are near the top as well. We had performance issues with Battlefield 2 at stock settings as the frame rates were consistently about 5fps below the other boards. The game also stuttered at various points in the benchmark and dropped online connections three out of five times. We finally traced the issue down to the BIOS and JMicron controller. After setting our memory latencies to 3-4-3-10 and loading the JMicron RAID driver instead the standard XP IDE driver our scores improved to 104.8.
Although not listed, we noticed a drop of about 200~300 points in PCMark 2005 when compared to our other P965 motherboards. The solution was once again to switch the JMicron controller from IDE to RAID and load the JMicron RAID driver set. Our scores improved from 5664 to 5962 while our disk intensive WinRAR and Nero Recode scores improved by a couple of percent.
In our overclocking tests the AB9 QuadGT was absolutely superb and offered the best overall performance even though the ASUS P5B-Deluxe has a 70MHz CPU speed advantage. This performance is a direct result of the 1067 strap settings and aggressive memory sub-timings. Stability was also excellent during overclocking, although we continued to have issues with BF2 until we changed the JMicron driver. Once the driver was changed our overclocked BF2 fps score improved to 151.3.
We have not encountered any performance issues with our Quad Core (QX6800), E6600, or E4300 in limited testing to date. We will provide a performance update with these processors in our next P965 comparison article. Overall, this board clearly performed very well in our limited testing.
Our abit AB9 QuadGT motherboard fully supports the current range of socket 775 Intel processors. We chose an E6300 for testing as we feel this will be a very popular Core 2 Duo CPU choice with the P965 motherboards. (Granted that many people looking at a $200+ motherboard like this abit are likely to opt for a more expensive CPU as well, but with the more budget-oriented P965 boards the choice makes sense, and we continue to use this CPU for purposes of consistency.)
| Standard Test Bed Performance Test Configuration |
|
| Processor: | Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 Dual Core, 1.86GHz, 2MB Unified Cache 1066FSB, 7x Multiplier |
| RAM: | Geil PC2-6400 800MHz Plus (2x1GB - GX22GB6400PDC) (Micron Memory Chips) |
| Hard Drive: | Seagate 320GB 7200RPM SATA2 16MB Buffer |
| System Platform Drivers: | Intel - 8.1.1.1010 |
| Video Cards: | 1 x MSI X1950XTX |
| Video Drivers: | ATI Catalyst 6.11 |
| CPU Cooling: | Scythe Infinity |
| Power Supply: | OCZ GameXstream 700W |
| Optical Drive: | Sony 18X AW-Q170A-B2 |
| Case: | Cooler Master CM Stacker 830 |
| Motherboards: | ASUS P5B-Deluxe WiFi (Intel P965 C2, 1.01G) - BIOS 0804 abit AB9-Pro (Intel P965 C1) - BIOS 1.5 abit AB9 QuadGT (Intel P965 C2) - BIOS 10 Biostar T-Force 965 Deluxe (Intel P965 C1) - BIOS IP96a803 Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 (Intel P965 C2) - BIOS F7 MSI P965 Platinum - (Intel P965 C2) - BIOS 1.2 |
| Operating System: | Windows XP Professional SP2 |
| . | |
A 2GB memory configuration is now standard in the AT test bed as most enthusiasts are currently purchasing this amount of memory. Our choice of DDR2-800 memory from GEIL offered a very 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 our test application results.
We are utilizing the MSI X1950XTX video card to ensure our 1280x1024 resolutions are not completely GPU bound for our motherboard test results. We did find in testing that applying a 4xAA/8xAF setting in most of today's latest games created a situation where the performance of the system starts becoming GPU limited. Our video tests are run at 1280x1024 resolution for this preview article at standard settings.
Synthetic and Application Performance
We are utilizing an abbreviated test suite for our first look at the abit AB9 QuadGT motherboard. We will present full test results in our next article that will look at new P965 boards from ASUS and Gigabyte.
 |
| Click to enlarge |
At stock speeds the AB9 QuadGT motherboard posts the best WinRAR and Quake 4 scores, and it's SuperPI and Nero Recode scores are near the top as well. We had performance issues with Battlefield 2 at stock settings as the frame rates were consistently about 5fps below the other boards. The game also stuttered at various points in the benchmark and dropped online connections three out of five times. We finally traced the issue down to the BIOS and JMicron controller. After setting our memory latencies to 3-4-3-10 and loading the JMicron RAID driver instead the standard XP IDE driver our scores improved to 104.8.
Although not listed, we noticed a drop of about 200~300 points in PCMark 2005 when compared to our other P965 motherboards. The solution was once again to switch the JMicron controller from IDE to RAID and load the JMicron RAID driver set. Our scores improved from 5664 to 5962 while our disk intensive WinRAR and Nero Recode scores improved by a couple of percent.
In our overclocking tests the AB9 QuadGT was absolutely superb and offered the best overall performance even though the ASUS P5B-Deluxe has a 70MHz CPU speed advantage. This performance is a direct result of the 1067 strap settings and aggressive memory sub-timings. Stability was also excellent during overclocking, although we continued to have issues with BF2 until we changed the JMicron driver. Once the driver was changed our overclocked BF2 fps score improved to 151.3.
We have not encountered any performance issues with our Quad Core (QX6800), E6600, or E4300 in limited testing to date. We will provide a performance update with these processors in our next P965 comparison article. Overall, this board clearly performed very well in our limited testing.
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Stele - Monday, January 22, 2007 - link
I second that. Intel has, unfortunately, a reputation for making drastic moves every now and then in a certain technological direction which it feels that everyone should head towards, and hurry - never mind if everyone else does not feel the same way about it, or if that direction is simply not ready for prime time; RDRAM, Itanic, BTX, and now removal of native IDE support stand testimony to that.I can't speak for everyone of course, but JMicron isn't so bad, really, at least from personal experience... a string of systems using P5B Deluxe and P5B-E Plus motherboards have so far behaved quite well during setup and installation. Part of the problem probably lies in how well motherboard manufacturers implement the device in their design and how much effort they put in to make sure they get it right. As for the alternatives to JMicron, it's not too easy to find one that can match the JMB363 in terms of features... PCIe, 2 SATA II-compliant ports, 1 ATA-133 IDE interface in a compact, single-chip solution. Perhaps Silicon Image should step forward and make use of their excellent IP to create such a competitor, but I suspect they're focusing on HDMI right now....