ABIT AN8 32X SLI Motherboard Review

The Test System

Benchmarks and Testing Setup:

Test Platform:

*LR wants to thank Tankguys Computer Parts for providing us a discount on the price of the DFI Expert Motherboard. Check them out at http://www.tankguys.biz/.

All tests were run using a clean install of Windows XP Professional with SP2. The ABIT AN8 32X used two different bios. The first bios is the only public release bios on the ABIT web site, bios number 10 (release bios). For overclocking, we used a beta bios which was sent to us to resolve the issues that we at Legit found while working with the board (We will explain more in our overclocking section). The DFI board uses the 12-07-05 BIOS. For our stock speed tests, we ran everything at default timings for the CPU. For both boards, our stock speed testing used OCZ 3700 Platinum 1 GB kit (TCCD), at speeds of 2-2-2-5 DDR400, and 2.7vDimm. Because our OCZ 3700 PLatinum does not like using dividers, for our overclocking, we used Corsair’s 3500LL 2GB kit. Timings for our overclocking were set to 2.5-3-3-8. For the ABIT AN8 32X we used a 3x multiplier for HTT, NB-SB and SB-NB settings. There is no control over the chipset or LDT voltage on the ABIT. The DFI motherboard LDT/HTT was set to x3, the LDT voltage set to 1.3V and the chipset voltage set to 1.6V. Both boards ran the ram at 2.8 vdimm. The video card was left at default timings as well for all tests. For this review, stability was determined by running our battery of tests 3 times, plus being able to complete 3 passes of memtest86 and the ability to complete a SuperPi 32mb test run.

On to the benchmarks!