Abit's Fatal1ty AA8XE
Test Systems & SiSoft SANDRA
How we configured our test systems: When configuring the test systems for this review, we first entered the system BIOS and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults." The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional was installed. When the installation was complete, we hit the Windows Update site and downloaded all of the available updates. Then we installed all of the necessary drivers and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating, drive indexing, and System Restore were also 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 the benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests...
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| SYSTEM 1: Intel Pentium 4 560 3.6GHz Abit Fatal1ty AA8XE i925XE Motherboard 2x512MB Kingston DDR2 533 PC2-4300 CL 3, 3, 3, 8 NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT On board Ethernet On board Audio WD "Raptor" 36GB Hard Drive 10,000 RPM SATA Windows XP Pro SP2 NVIDIA Forceware v66.93 DirectX 9.0c |
SYSTEM 2: Intel Pentium 4 560 3.6GHz ASUS P5AD2-E i925XE Motherboard 2x512MB Kingston DDR2 533 PC2-4300 CL 3, 3, 3, 8 NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT On board Ethernet On board Audio WD "Raptor" 36GB Hard Drive 10,000 RPM SATA Windows XP Pro SP2 NVIDIA Forceware v66.93 DirectX 9.0c |
SYSTEM 3: Intel Pentium 4 560 3.6GHz Intel D925XECV2 i925XE Motherboard 2x512MB Kingston DDR2 533 PC2-4300 CL 3, 3, 3, 8 NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT On board Ethernet On board Audio WD "Raptor" 36GB Hard Drive 10,000 RPM SATA Windows XP Pro SP2 NVIDIA Forceware v66.93 DirectX 9.0c |
SYSTEM 4: AMD Athlon 64 4000+ Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI nForce 4 Motherboard 2x512MBCorsair XMS PC3200 RAM CL 2, 2, 2, 5 NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT |
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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 can provide a host of useful information about your hardware and operating system. We ran three of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2004 suite (CPU, Multimedia, and Memory). All of these tests were run with our processor set to its default clock speed of 3.6GHz (18x200MHz).
;) CPU |
;) Multimedia |
;) Memory |
In these relatively "lite-duty" SANDRA tests, Abit's Fatal1ty AA8XE performed on par with other i925XE motherboards we've tested. The CPU Arithmetic benchmark had the Fatal1ty / P4 560 combo falling just shy of an Opteron 152 (2.6GHz) in the ALU part of the test, but beating the Opteron reference system handliy in the FPU portion of the test. In SANDRA's Multimedia benchmark module, the Fatal1ty AA8XE perfromed almost identically to the refernce P4 560 based system, which is to say it was near the top of the chart. And in the Memory Bandwidth benchmark our Fatal1ty AA8XE based system broke the 5.1GB/s mark in its default configuration.
