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| Introduction | ||||||||
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It’s been almost one year since Intel launched the 965 series of chipsets, which were originally designed to be packaged with Intel’s Core 2 Duo series of processors. While the 965 series didn't perform quite as well as Intel’s flagship 975x chipset in some cases, most notable in multi-GPU configurations, it made a name for itself due to its more flexible nature along with lower power consumption and heat output, and strong overclocking, which were made possible due to the more refined manufacturing process used to build the chipset. Not only was the 965 series a great overclocking chipset for the money, but over time, it’s evolved to support the changing needs of the market. While this chipset was originally a solution for 1066 MHz FSB-based dual core processors with DDR2-800 memory and single graphics card, newly launched 965 series boards support quad-core processors, multi-GPU ATI Crossfire, and unofficially, 1333 MHz FSB speeds and memory speeds far greater than DDR2-800. While the 965 is definitely still a viable player in today’s market, Intel’s own newly launched P35 Express series of chipsets are eyeing to take over the 965’s market share in the near future. The P35 Express brings new features to the table, such as (official) 1333 MHz FSB processor support, optional support for DDR3 memory modules, native eSATA, and additional USB ports, as well as a few other smaller features. The P35 Express is definitely a solid follow-up to the 965-series, as the two products share much of the same core architecture. The dilemma is, if you wanted a mid-range to high-end Intel powered system using an Intel-built chipset, which is the best choice? While most enthusiasts gravitate towards the latest and greatest, there is definitely something to be said for new products which are based on more mature chipsets like the 965. The kinks have been worked out, feature sets are typically stable and perform well, and they usually offer a much better experience ‘out of the box’ rather than dealing with first generation hardware and their usual driver issues and quirks. However, as the P35 Express is largely based on the same architecture as the 965, the risk of stability / driver issues is likely minimal, coupled with the fact that Intel typically has very solid chipset drivers out of the box, even for brand new products. Abit will help us solve this dilemma today. They’ve recently launched two new motherboards, based on nearly identical designs, with both the 965 and P35 Express chipsets being used. On the 965-side, we’ve got the AB9 QuadGT, whereas their P35 Express board is tagged with the IP35 Pro name. Both boards support quad-core processors, feature interesting heat-pipe based cooling systems, along with impressive arrays of storage and multimedia connectivity options. Before we dig in too deep, let's have a look at Abit's wild, automobile-themed retail shipping boxes for these two boards. Is Abit insinuating that one is more rugged (like a monster truck) while the other is fast and hazardous? Perhaps we're just reading too much into them.
As you can see by the images and specification sheets above, these two platforms are incredibly similar, and likely were designed in conjunction (or right after each other). Both boards sport the same PCB color, many of the component placements are identical, and we only see small differences in terms of feature sets. In a side by side comparison, the newer IP35 Pro board boasts a newer chipset design, support for newer processors, along with a second Gigabit Ethernet port and two more USB 2.0 ports. |
| Layout : Abit IP35 Pro | ||||
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Layout : Abit IP35 Pro The Abit IP35 Pro is an eye-catching design, featuring the dark blue / teal PCB color which Abit has used several times before, along with some vibrant copper colored chipset cooling components which really make this motherboard design “pop”. As expected, the board is based on a standard ATX design, meaning it will fit in all modern cases. The board requires a 24-pin primary ATX connector and an 8-pin +12V secondary ATX connector, both of which are elegantly placed on the sides of the PCB in order to not interrupt airflow to hot components.
The board supports all manner of Socket-775 processors, and Abit leaves plenty of room around the CPU socket for large sized heatsinks. The processor’s VRM modules are passively cooled by the onboard cooling system, as they sit below the copper heatsink. The board officially supports quad-core chips along with Intel’s new 1333 MHz (or 1.33 GHz, if you prefer) front side bus based Core 2 processors, giving it additional lifespan in comparison to 965 platforms. Abit also keeps plenty of 3-pin and 4-pin fan connecters around these vital components, which isn’t normally worth noting, although the amount of connectors available struck us as abnormally high, which is definitely a good thing. The board has four DDR2 DIMM slots, capable of holding up to 8 GB of DDR2-800 memory in a dual-channel configuration. The memory modules talk to the P35 Express Northbridge, which is housed under a large copper heatsink, connected to two other heatpipes. The P35 Express Northbridge does consume more power in comparison to the P965, which makes larger chipset cooling necessary for silent operation, although overall heat output and power consumption levels are still quite low. In testing, we found that the chipset cooler only got mildly warm during long term operation, which basically tells us that Abit’s cooling system is more than sufficient in handling the job of cooling this chipset. With this additional cooling power and flexible BIOS controls, chipset-level overclocking is a piece of cake. The board is equipped with dual PCI Express x16 sized slots, which are capable of running dual ATI graphics cards in a Crossfire configuration (although this is not labeled on the box). The primary PCIe x16 slot runs at full x16 timings, whereas the secondary slot runs at x4 speeds, so it’s not completely optimal for ultra high-end gaming systems. For mid-range Crossfire configurations, though, you should be plenty happy. You can also use the secondary PCI Express x16 sized slot for other high-end peripherals like PCIe RAID / LAN cards, or another dedicated graphics card for multi-monitor purposes. There’s also a four-pin molex connector which sits right above the secondary PCI Express x16 slot. For those who want to use two high-end graphics cards, this connector provides a little extra juice for stability purposes. In addition to these two slots, we also have a single PCI Express x1 slot (located above the primary PCIe x16 slot) along with three 32-bit PCI slots, which makes for an expansion configuration that most will appreciate. Abit’s Southbridge chipset cooler is also short enough that full-length PCI/PCIe cards will have no problem sitting over the length of the motherboard. Abit’s also mounted the storage ports at a right angle which helps eliminate cable clutter in this area.
The Intel ICH9R Southbridge controller supports six Serial ATA-II/300 ports in both RAID and non-RAID configurations. The board supports RAID 0, 1, 10, and 5, and fully supports Serial ATA optical disks as well. The board is also equipped with a single Ultra ATA/133 port, for those with legacy optical drives. Even more storage abilities are available through an onboard JMicron PCI-based Serial ATA-II/300 controller, which powers two eSATA ports on the I/O panel. These ports also support RAID 0 and 1, if required. Abit does not bundle any eSATA cables with their board, but does bundle six latching Serial ATA-II/300 cables and Ultra ATA/floppy cables with the board. Beyond basic storage cables and driver CD/manuals, the motherboard bundle with this board is actually quite bland. Sitting next to the SATA-II/300 ports is a diagnostic LED array, which provides POST codes during booting, which can help you diagnose motherboard issues quickly and easily. There are also hard power and reset buttons on the board itself, which are handy if you’re testing or using this motherboard outside of a chassis. The board is equipped with headers for an additional eight USB 2.0 ports (four on the I/O panel for a total of twelve), along with two Firewire 400 ports. Abit does not have any Firewire ports on their I/O panel for this board, but they do bundle an adapter which brings one 6-pin Firewire and one 4-pin Firewire port to the back of the chassis, connecting to the internal headers.
Abit IP35 Pro I/O Panel Looking at the back panel, we can see the aforementioned USB 2.0 and eSATA ports. Audio-wise, the board is equipped with a Realtek ALC888 HD Audio CODEC, which powers the board’s 8-channel analog/ 7.1 channel S/PDIF digital audio ports, seen above. The board is also equipped with TOSlink Optical S/PDIF digital input and output ports, which is an interesting (and not often used) choice. To the right, we can see dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, both of which are powered by individual Realtek PCI based GigE chips. We would have preferred newer PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet connectivity options, although as Abit is dealing with limited PCI Express lanes to utilize with the Intel P35 Express chipset, we can see why they opted to stick with a tried and true solution. If you look closely to the right of the PS/2 ports, as well, you can see an interesting Abit-only solution. There is a small switch here, which when flipped, clears the motherboard’s CMOS quickly and easily. If you go a bit too far with your overclocking endeavours, instead of hunting down a set of pins and moving a jumper to reset the CMOS, all you’ll have to do is flip the switch once, and the motherboard will reset to its factory settings. Nice and simple, a feature we definitely made use of. All in all, a very solid board design with no major flaws to be pointed out. |
| Layout : Abit AB9 QuadGT | ||||
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The AB9 QuadGT motherboard has a design which is very similar to the newer IP35 Pro. However, the QuadGT does have some subtle but notable differences beyond the chipset which separate the two to different price points. While the QuadGT is decidedly less feature packed, it still has some interesting features which help set it apart from competing 965 boards.
The AB9 QuadGT motherboard is also based on a standard ATX layout with a dark blue / teal colored PCB. The board runs off Intel’s P965 chipset in combination with the widely used ICH8R Southbridge controller chip. The board supports Socket-775 Core 2 based quad and dual-core processors, along with support for older Socket-775 Pentium models as well. Officially, the board only supports 1066 MHz front side bus based processors based on the retail box, but Abit has just released a new BIOS revision as of a few weeks back which allows the board to support 1333 MHz front side bus based processors. Hopefully newly shipped QuadGT motherboards will include this BIOS revision out of the box. Sitting alongside the right side of the board, we have four DDR2 DIMM sockets, capable of supporting up to 8 GB (2 GB per slot) and speeds up to DDR2-800. At DDR2-800 speeds in a dual-channel memory configuration, this means that the board can utilize up to 12.8 GB/s of memory bandwidth, on par with other platforms at this price point. The cooling configuration is one of the stronger points of the platform, as Abit has equipped this board with custom copper heatsinks in order to keep the P965 chipset cool while producing zero noise. Granted, the 965-series runs fairly cool as it is, and plenty of platforms have launched with passive cooling. However, Abit’s cooling design is sleek and efficient, moving heat away from the Northbridge chip and cooling the VRM modules at the same time with the use of their Silent OTES heatpipe system. Abit also includes small slits in the I/O panel shield, which helps move air over the copper fins. Abit’s cooling system should allow for flexible overclocking as well, as you can push the chipset voltage up without having to worry about overheating. As for expansion, the board is equipped with an interesting configuration, which should please most users, but undoubtedly some will have issue with. First off, the board supports dual PCI Express x16 sized slots, both of which can hold graphics cards if need be. The board has support for ATI Crossfire technology for multi-GPU rendering as well, or you can use them independently for multi-monitor puposes. The lower PCIe x16 slot actually has an x4 electrical connection, similar to other Crossfire-enabled 965 platforms, due to the PCI Express limitations within this chipset. Thus, high-end gamers will likely want to look elsewhere for a multi-monitor solution, although the 965 can provide a solid boost for two mid-range cards to give performance levels of a high-end card. The board is also equipped with a single PCI Express x1 slot along with two 32-bit PCI slots. The ICH8R chipset supports up to ten USB 2.0 ports, which the AB9 QuadGT uses fully, as the motherboard is equipped with four USB 2.0 ports on the I/O panel along with pins for up to six more underneath the last PCI slot. The board also supports Firewire 400 connectivity through a dedicated PCI-based Texas Instruments Firewire controller, which Abit uses by putting one six-pin Firewire 400 port on the I/O panel and allowing pin-level connectivity for one more.
The board is quite flexible in terms of storage, supporting Serial ATA-II/300 RAID, eSATA, and Ultra ATA/133 as well. The Intel ICH8R Southbridge supports six Serial ATA-II/300 ports, which supports RAID levels 0, 1, 10, and 5 natively. The board is also equipped with a JMicron Serial ATA-II/300 controler which supports the two eSATA ports on the I/O panel, which also can support RAID levels 0, 1, and JBOD if need be. The board also supports a single Ultra ATA port which can support up to two legacy IDE drives.
AB9 QuadGT I/O Panel The I/O panel is nearly identical to that of the previously seen P35 Express board, although slightly modified. The AB9 QuadGT also uses the Realtek ALC888 HD Audio CODEC, which allows for 8-channel analog and 7.1 digital S/PDIF audio, which Abit makes full use of with this board, including both optical TOSlink input/output ports. This board also uses the same 32-bit PCI Gigabit Ethernet chip from Realtek as the IP35 Pro, although there is only a single GigE port here. With the secondary GigE port excluded, Abit can put a full-sized Firewire 400 port on the I/O panel, which the IP35 Pro doesn’t have. The I/O panel also features an identical USB, eSATA, and PS2 configuration as the IP35 Pro, including the Abit custom clear CMOS switch. Like the IP35 Pro, the QuadGT has a very solid design which will please both normal home users and enthusiasts. It’s obvious that they’ve had a lot of time to refine their 965 based designs, and this is the fruit of that labor. |
| BIOS, Overclocking, and Power Consumption | ||
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Both the IP35 Pro and the AB9 QuadGT use BIOS technology from Phoenix, and in typical Abit fashion, quite a bit has been added to the stock BIOS menu in order to make them unique. Both boards feature Abit’s own onboard uGuru system monitoring chip onboard, which allows for more flexible overclocking, fan controls, and thermal sensing. Abit keeps all of their custom BIOS options in a separate menu for ease of use purposes. As you would expect from modern day Abit motherboards, you have full control over voltage levels and timing controls, giving plenty of overclocking functionality without getting too overly technical. One of the core differences between the BIOSes which we noticed is that the newer IP35 Pro platform supports a wider range of memory speeds in comparison to the AB9 QuadGT. As the IP35 Pro has official support for 1333 MHz FSB speeds (and since memory speeds are tied to front side bus speeds on Intel based chipsets), the IP35 Pro has to support additional memory divisors in order to run memory modules properly. However, even if you’re not using a 1333 MHz FSB based processor, you can still benefit from additional memory flexibility on this board. With identical hardware configurations and cooling, we set out to see which platform could overclock better with our 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 processor. We’ve seen Nvidia platforms take this chip up to 490 MHz FSB (1960 MHz FSB quad-pumped), although since Nvidia platforms can run the FSB independent from the memory bus, they have an inherent advantage. With our new P35 Express platform, we were able to take our chip nearly as high, topping out at 466 MHz FSB (1866 MHz FSB quad-pumped) speed. Our P965 platform undortunately did not fare as well, as the board topped out at 425 MHz FSB (1700 MHz FSB quad-pumped). While both are healthy overclocks, we were a bit surprised at how low our AB9 QuadGT overclocks were, considering how the P965 has been an excellent overclocker in the past.
We were also curious to see if there were any major differences in terms of power consumption between these two boards. Thus, we set them up with identical configurations (2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 GB memory, Radeon X1950 Pro graphics) with the same PSU and other hardware, and watched power usage levels on a watt meter. Here are our results.
In both cases, we found that Abit’s newer IP35 Pro (P35 Express) consumed less power (about 12W) in comparison to the AB9 QuadGT (P965). With lower power consumption, we also have less heat production, which leads to overall cooler and quieter system configurations. The IP35 Pro consumes about as much power as Nvidia’s 650i Ultra platform, which has a similar feature set to the IP35, and also runs with passive cooling. |
| SiSoft Sandra | ||||||||
Our first round of synthetic tests show the two Abit platforms performing on par with our competing eVGA/nVidia platforms in terms of CPU performance, although both Intel based boards falter a bit when it comes to memory performance. Nvidia’s products show higher bandwidth numbers and lower latency, both of which help overall performance. We see very little difference between the memory controllers of the P35 Express and P965, which is a little disappointing, as we were hoping to see a performance boost with the P35. |
| 3DMark and PCMark | ||||
Interestingly, we see our Abit Intel platforms pulling ahead in 3DMark performance, but falling behind in PCMark performance. The margin of difference between these boards is quite small, and one would be hard pressed to tell a difference in real world usage. |
| Half Life 2 and FEAR | ||||||||
Despite the architectural differences between these four boards, we found gaming performance to be near-identical with the same processor / memory / graphics card configuration. We were expecting Nvidia’s platforms to perform a little better due to the lower latency memory numbers we saw earlier, but in reality we see very little difference. |
| Photoshop CS3 and Windows Media Encoder 9 | ||||||||
Our Abit boards performed a little better than expected in Photoshop CS3, delivering a slight performance edge over competing Nvidia platforms. Interestingly, our Media Encoding benchmarks were a little more wild than usual, showing our Nvidia platforms encoding faster. |
| 7-Zip and WinRAR | ||||||||
Ending on a positive note for Abit, we see both their P35 and P965 boards delivering great compression performance, besting the competing Nvidia boards in both tests. Typically, file compression is CPU and disk limited, but even with identical hardware, we do see some variance between chipsets in this arena. |
| Conclusion | ||||||||
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Our Conclusion
Returning to the crux of the matter, which chipset is the better option today? After testing nearly identical platforms based on the new Intel P35 Express and the nicely aged Intel P965 chipset, we would definitely opt for the P35 Express. While the differences between the two boards and chipsets is not incredibly large, the P35 Express clearly is a better product for the money today, in terms of performance, overclockability, and even for environmental reasons.
Currently, Abit’s Intel P35 Express based platform (IP35 Pro) is selling for about $30 more in comparison to their new P965 board (AB9 QuadGT), which makes deciding a product a bit more difficult. For an extra $30, IP35 Pro buyers receive a board with full 1333 MHz FSB support, an additional Gigabit Ethernet port, better cooling, an additional two USB 2.0 ports, and greater overclocking abilities. In addition, we found that the P35 Express platform consumed less power and ran cooler in comparison to the P965, which is definitely a worthwhile aspect to mention. Considering the chipset’s age, the Intel P965 based AB9 QuadGT still holds up quite well in today’s environment. For the most part, all of the core features which are required for a modern high-end system are there, and now that Abit has added 1333 MHz FSB support through a BIOS update, the platform should be able to carry on for quite a long time. We were somewhat disappointed in the board’s overclocking abilities, but we still would have no problem recommending it for a new system configuration. Given the choice between the two boards, however, if you've got the funds, opting for the newer IP35 Pro is the way to go. Both boards boast exceptional designs, both from functional and aesthetic points of view, and we really like Abit’s SilentOTES noiseless cooling systems. Abit’s latest boards are showing far more refinement and class in comparison to some of their boards in the past, which we’re very glad to see. With Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte launching exceptionally complicated designs, it’s refreshing to see new board launches which are streamlined and relatively clean. Both boards are definitely recommended.
Abit IP35 Pro
Abit AB9 QuadGT
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