Abit SLI Motherboard Showcase
Our Test Systems & SANDRA
How we configured our test systems: When configuring the test systems for this review, we first entered their respective 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 installation was complete, we installed all of the necessary drivers and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were then 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.
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| SYSTEM 1: AMD Athlon 64 4000+ (2.4GHz) Abit Fatal1ty AN8 SLI NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI 2x512MB Corsair PC3200 CL 2-2-2-10 GeForce 6800 GT (x2 for SLI) Onboard Ethernet Onboard Audio WD "Raptor" HD 10,000 RPM SATA Windows XP Pro SP2 nForce 4 Drivers v6.70 Forceware v81.89 DirectX 9.0c |
SYSTEM 2: Pentium 4 670J (3.8GHz) Abit NI8 SLI NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition 2x512MB Corsair DDR2-667 CL 3-2-2-7 GeForce 6800 GT (x2 for SLI) On-board Ethernet On-board Audio WD "Raptor" HD 10,000 RPM SATA Windows XP Pro SP2 nForce 4 Drivers v7.15 Forceware v81.89 DirectX 9.0c |
SYSTEM 3: AMD Athlon 64 4000+ (2.4GHz) Sapphire PI-A9RX480 Radeon Xpress 200 2x512MB Corsair PC3200 CL 2-2-2-10 GeForce 6800 GT Onboard Ethernet Onboard Audio WD "Raptor" HD 10,000 RPM SATA Windows XP Pro SP2 Radeon Xpress 200 v1 Forceware v81.89 DirectX 9.0c |
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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 provide a host of useful information about your hardware and operating system. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2005 suite (CPU, Multimedia, Memory and File System). On the Abit NI8 SLI board, we clocked the system memory at DDR2-667 speeds, but all other clocks were left at their default values.
;) Abit Fatal1ty AN8 SLI CPU Benchmark AMD Athon 64 4000+ |
;) Abit Fatal1ty AN8 SLI Multimedia Benchmark AMD Athon 64 4000+ |
;) Abit Fatal1ty AN8 SLI Memory Benchmark 1GB DDR400 |
;) Abit Fatal1ty AN8 SLI File System Benchmark WD Raptor 36GB |
;) Abit NI8 SLI CPU Benchmark Pentium 4 670J (3.8GHz) |
;) Abit NI8 SLI Multimedia Benchmark Pentium 4 670J (3.8GHz) |
;) Abit NI8 SLI Memory Benchmark 1GB PC25400 |
;) Abit NI8 SLI File System Benchmark WD Raptor 36GB |
The various sub-system benchmarks built into SiSoft SANDRA 2005 don't report anything out of ordinary. The AMD Athlon 64 4000+ powered Abit Fatal1ty AN8 SLI performed right in-line with similarly configured systems in SANDRA's database, as did the Intel Pentium 4 670J powered NI8 SLI. The CPU, multimedia, and memory bandwidth benchmark results for both boards were also on par with what we've seen in the past from competing products. SANDRA's file system benchmark also reported similar scores for both platforms as well; which was to be expected considering they were benchmarked using the exact same drive.
