DX9 Gaming Performance

Gaming Performance

Gaming Performance

Gaming Performance

Gaming Performance

One of the strong points of this board is indeed its gaming performance. When this board and the graphics card were run at stock specification speeds, they equaled or surpassed their competitors in our testing. In Doom 3, the margin was quite wide and we had to rerun the bench several times to verify its authenticity. We believe that the superior system bandwidth coupled with the Forceware beta 78.05 drivers certainly contributed to this overall score. In AquaMark3 the score was exactly that of the MSI based system. As has been the case in recent years, ABIT has tuned this board particularly well towards the gaming segment.

Memory Performance DX8 Gaming Performance
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  • jojo4u - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link

    The graphs give a nice overview, good work.

    Please consider to include the information what AF level was used into the graphs. This is something all recent reviews here have have been lacking.

    About the image quality: The shimmering was greatly reduced with the fixed driver (78.03). So it's down to NV40 level now. But 3dCenter.de[1] and Computerbase.de conclude that only enabling "high quality" in the Forceware brings comparable image quality to "A.I. low". Perhaps you find the time to explore this issue in the image quality tests.

    [1] http://www.3dcenter.de/artikel/g70_flimmern/index_...">http://www.3dcenter.de/artikel/g70_flimmern/index_...
    This article is about the unfixed quality. But to judge the G70 today, have a look at the 6800U videos.
    http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=1549&am...">http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=1549&am...
    This article shows the performance hit of enabling "high quality"
  • jojo4u - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link

    oops wrong forum
  • Avalon - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link

    Thanks for the clarification Wesley, and welcome aboard Randi!
  • Wesley Fink - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link

    Please welcome Randi Sica as our newest reviewer at AnandTech. Randi is a friend who is well known in the Extreme Overclocking community as Mr. Icee. That gives Randi a keen eye when looking at what's right and wrong with a motherboard from an Extreme Overclocker's perspective.

    We think you will also find Randi's review perspective and approach a little different. Those who have been screaming for overclocked benchmarks in board reviews will find them in Randi's reviews.

    This is Randi's first review at AnandTech, so please make him feel welcomed.
  • yacoub - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link

    PASSIVELY COOLED! That's soooo appealing. I wish board makers could get the northbridges cool enough on the AMD chipset to make more passively cooled boards. I hate having another fan in the case, especially a tiny one running at high revs making a racket. It's bad enough most GPUs suffer from that, we don't need another one on the mobo. :(
  • DigitalFreak - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link

    Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I don't think the audio is on the PCI-E bus. The codec hangs directly off the southbridge, and isn't on any bus. If you look at the slot the audio card goes in, it's actually a PCI-E 1x connector turned backwards. I'm assuming that they use that particular connector because it's cheaper than designing something custom. Still, not a bad job on the CPU utilization.

    BTW, the chip is an ALC850, not ACL850 as mentioned on page 3.
  • Wesley Fink - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link

    Thanks for pointing this out. The references to the audio connector have been corrected to "dedicated audio connector" which it is unless we hear otherwise from Abit. We have seen the separate dedicated audio card can significantly reduce CPU overhead, and Abit seems to have done well with this idea on this board.
  • Live - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link

    Enough said...
  • Avalon - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link

    quote:

    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


    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.
  • Wesley Fink - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link

    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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