ABIT AN8 32X SLI Motherboard Review

The Tests: Overall System Performance and Memory Bandwidth

PCMark05:

PCMark05 is an application-based benchmark and a premium tool for measuring overall PC performance. It uses portions of real applications instead of including very large applications or using specifically created code. This allows PCMark05 to be a smaller installation as well as to report very accurate results.

Everest Version 2.20:

Everst 2.20 is a professional system information, diagnostics and benchmarking program for Win32 platforms. It extracts details of all components of the PC. It also tests the actual read and write speeds of your memory giving a fairly accurate look of true memory performance.

Sisoft; Sandra 2005 SR3a:

Sisoft Sandra 2005 is designed to test the theoretical power of a complete system and individual components. The numbers taken though are, again, purely theoretical and may not represent real world performance. Higher numbers represent better performance in memory bandwidth. The chart was based off of the unbuffered bandwidth scores.

ScienceMark 2.0 Final:

Science Mark 2.0 is an attempt to put the truth behind benchmarking. In an attempt to model real world demands and performance, ScienceMark 2.0 is a suite of high-performance benchmarks that realistically stress system performance without architectural bias. All of our testing was completed on the 32 Bit Final benchmark version that is dated March 21st 2005.

Super PI Mod v1.4:

Super PI is a program a lot of enthusiasts use to benchmark overall system performance, as the program is capable of calculating pi up to 33.55 million digits on a timer. Many overclockers and enthusiasts are in a battle to get the lowest Super Pi times possible. We use the 2MB test this time, as it demands quite a bit more stability than a 1MB test. Of course, most believe using the 32MB test is a must to prove stability.

Once again, we see that there is very little difference in performance between these boards. One oddity was the score we got for the ABIT board in the SuperPi test. We ran this test a number of times more than the norm just to make sure that we were getting correct numbers. I can only assume that because of the ram tweaking available in the DFI bios, that there was something that was giving both DFI boards a great boost. As a note, we do no special tweaking for the benchmarks of our boards. Other than setting the dividers and primary timings to 2-2-2-5 at DDR400, everything else is left at auto or default.