Abit AL8 945P Motherboard Review

How we configured our test systems: When configuring the test systems for this review, we first entered their system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults."  The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional (SP2) was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed the rest of the necessary drivers and removed Windows Messenger from the system.  Auto-Updating and System Restore were disabled, and we set up a 768MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.

Test System Specifications "Intel & AMD Inside!"

Preliminary Benchmarks with SiSoft SANDRA 2005 Synthetic Testing

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. SANDRA consists of a set of information and diagnostic utilities that can provide a host of useful information about your hardware and operating system. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprises the SANDRA 2005 suite (CPU, Multimedia, Cache, and Memory).

CPU Arithmetic Benchmark

Multimedia Benchmark

CPU Cache Benchmark

Memory Benchmark

SANDRA's four components reflected a common picture.  With the AL8 equipped with our Pentium D 820, there were no real surprises.  This particular setup stacked up well compared to SANDRA's internal database of reference systems, but we'll reserve judgement until we run a few more tests.  We should also note that ABIT clocks the AL8 at 204MHz, running a little more agressive than stock 200MHz FSB, but that shouldn't lead to breakout performance advantages in the pages ahead.