Intel P965 Showdown - Abit vs. GIGABYTE

How we configured our test systems: When configuring our test systems for the following set of benchmarks, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults." We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set memory timings for DDR2-800 at 4,4,4,12 1T latency.  The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional SP2 was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed the drivers necessary for our components, 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.

HotHardware's Test Systems Intel Inside

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2007 Synthetic Benchmarks

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran three of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2007 suite (CPU, Multimedia, and Memory) with the Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6, Abit AB9 Pro and our Core 2 Duo E6400 processor. All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at its default clock speed of 2.13GHz.

GA-965-DQ6 CPU Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13GHz

GA-965-DQ6 MM Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13GHz

GA-965-DQ6 Memory Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13GHz / DDR2-800

AB9 Pro CPU Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13GHz

AB9 Pro MM Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13GHz

AB9 Pro Memory Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13GHz / DDR2-800

For all three tests, the AB9 Pro managed to outpace the DQ6, although the difference is negligible. The AB9 pro manages to pull ahead by 2% on the memory and multimedia tests but the two boards post nearly identical scores in the CPU arithmetic test.