Abit AB9 Pro: A sneak peek at Intel's new P965 chipset
by Gary Key on July 3, 2006 3:45 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Test Systems
All three boards we're including in the benchmarks support current socket 775 Intel processors, and the Abit AB9 Pro and NVIDIA 590 SLI Intel Edition will fully support the Intel Core 2 Duo processors upon release. We did our benchmarking with the Pentium D 805 processor but will follow up shortly with the Pentium 950D and 955XE benchmarks once we receive our production release BIOS. The Abit AB9 Pro fully supported our E6300, E6600, and X6800 Core 2 Duo processors, but we cannot provide results at this time due to NDA restrictions.
A 2GB memory configuration is now standard in the AT test bed as most enthusiasts are currently purchasing this amount of memory. We chose memory from Corsair that would offer a wide range of memory settings during our stock and overclocked test runs. Our memory timings are set based upon determining the best memory bandwidth via MemTest 86 and our test application results for the Asus and NVIDIA boards. Our current beta level Abit BIOS locked the memory timings at 5-5-5-12 so we also tested the Asus board at this setting in order to provide a fair comparison.
All other components in our test configurations are exactly the same with the boards being set up in their default configurations. Our video tests are run at 1280x1024 resolution for this article at standard settings. We will not report on 1600x1200 4xAA/8xAF single and SLI until we have a production ready BIOS to review. This holds true for the balance of our Networking, Storage System, and Audio benchmarks.
All three boards we're including in the benchmarks support current socket 775 Intel processors, and the Abit AB9 Pro and NVIDIA 590 SLI Intel Edition will fully support the Intel Core 2 Duo processors upon release. We did our benchmarking with the Pentium D 805 processor but will follow up shortly with the Pentium 950D and 955XE benchmarks once we receive our production release BIOS. The Abit AB9 Pro fully supported our E6300, E6600, and X6800 Core 2 Duo processors, but we cannot provide results at this time due to NDA restrictions.
| Test Systems | |
| Processor: | Intel Pentium D 805 |
| RAM: | 2 x 1GB Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C3 |
| RAM Settings: | 5-5-5-12 533MHZ, 2.100V - Abit 3-2-2-8 533MHZ, 2.250V - Asus/NVIDIA |
| OS Hard Drive: | 1 x WD Raptor 74GB 7200 RPM SATA (8MB Buffer) |
| System Platform Drivers: | NVIDIA Platform Driver - 9.35 Intel Platform Driver - 8.0.1.1002 |
| Video Card: | 1 x EVGA 7900GTX (PCI Express) for all tests |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA nForce 91.31 WHQL |
| Optical Drive: | BenQ DW1640 |
| Cooling: | Retail Intel HSF |
| Power Supply: | OCZ GamexStream 700W |
| Case: | Gigabyte 3D Aurora |
| Operating System: | Windows XP Professional SP2 |
| Motherboards: | Abit AB9 Pro NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI Intel Edition Asus P5WD2-E Premium |
A 2GB memory configuration is now standard in the AT test bed as most enthusiasts are currently purchasing this amount of memory. We chose memory from Corsair that would offer a wide range of memory settings during our stock and overclocked test runs. Our memory timings are set based upon determining the best memory bandwidth via MemTest 86 and our test application results for the Asus and NVIDIA boards. Our current beta level Abit BIOS locked the memory timings at 5-5-5-12 so we also tested the Asus board at this setting in order to provide a fair comparison.
All other components in our test configurations are exactly the same with the boards being set up in their default configurations. Our video tests are run at 1280x1024 resolution for this article at standard settings. We will not report on 1600x1200 4xAA/8xAF single and SLI until we have a production ready BIOS to review. This holds true for the balance of our Networking, Storage System, and Audio benchmarks.
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CYBERX1800XT - Thursday, July 6, 2006 - link
it's going to take alot to convince me that abit's quality in electroitics(resistors,capicitors,pnp transistors and voltage regulators) hasn't overshadowed there so-called new make over. all i have to say is 'anyone remember the abit be-6 revision 2?? i do,,i also remember 12 hours after buying an abit mobo,,at least 14 caps literally blew up. so all this halla-ballhooey about the product line refreshment may just be hype. i'm not scowling at anyone at anandtech,,i believe and trust there reviews. who i don't trust is abit's choice in 2nd or 3rd rate electroitics. besides,,who cares,,this is a rather whimpy board. for the cost of this mobo,,you could easily spend 20 more bucks and get a ASUS A8R-MVP,,and have crossfire to boot. i'm sorry to sound so negative,,but abit left a bad taste in my mouth in 2000. and it has yet to have left. i honestly apologize to everyone at anandtech. not demeaning any of you guys,i totally trust your revievs. but i switched to amd,,and i only bought 1 abit board. and that will never happen again. i will ONLY use ASUS!!!araczynski - Wednesday, July 5, 2006 - link
personally i find the inclusion of onboard audio on ALL motherboards to be quite the waste of consumer dollars. what kind of an "enthusiast" puts up with onboard audio? granted its more then fine for windows, but when you're aiming a mobo at an enthusiast you don't have to make him pay for some crappy soundchip that he'll never do more with then disable in the bios.and yes, get rid of the floppy connector (usb version for those that can't live without them).
Pirks - Wednesday, July 5, 2006 - link
Not quite that simple - it's actually cheaper to make mobos with audio than without it. With audio you have one manufacturing line cranking out mobos, just one model => CHEAP. If you wanna get mobos w/o audio, you gonna get TWO manufacturing lines cranking out mobos => EXPENSIVE. This is why they always produce only ONE SINGLE MOBO MODEL, EVERYTHING INCLUDED - all the floppy and legacy crap - 'cause that's CHEAP. You go to options, exclude this, exclude that blah blah - and the price -wooosh!- soars up to clouds and the blue sky :)bob4432 - Wednesday, July 5, 2006 - link
glad to see a floppy is still around. i am probably the only person that uses one, but i appreciatet the m/b manf for taking me into consideration :Dafrodite - Tuesday, July 4, 2006 - link
Say what!?!The problem here is the boneheaded optical drive manufacturers not using SATA on their drives, not Intel removing obsolete technology.
I say:
Get rid of PATA
Get rid of Floppy-drives
Get rid of mouse and keyboard ports
Then use all that lovely real estate on the board to put a digital tv receiver or bluetooth-module or wifi or firewire or just more USB-slots or whatever you want..
Please, what year is it now, 2006 or 1996.. floppydrive connectors on a "next-gen motherboard"??
mine - Saturday, July 8, 2006 - link
second thatiwhat about the following scenario.... you will never forget that :
3 young Mac videoeditors rolling on the floor with wet trousers looking @ a Windows XP install with an open case
an attached floppy and F6
these people have never seen a floppy in their whole life and these things are one click away on Mac OS X
Pirks - Tuesday, July 4, 2006 - link
Hmm, why this smells like a Mac? ;)JarredWalton - Tuesday, July 4, 2006 - link
Until we have the replacements ready, completely removing support for older technologies is jumping the gun. We need a next-generation operating system that doesn't ever require a floppy drive (which we will get with Windows Vista). More importantly, we need SATA optical drives that are at least as good as the PATA counterparts, and with equivalent prices. Right now, I'm only aware of one company making SATA DVDR drives (Plextor), and the consensus seems to be that the drives aren't all that great. Widespread support for SATA optical drives (meaning software support -- what good is a DVDR if your favorite burning application doesn't support it?) is still lacking.The end result is that every motherboard manufacturer that uses ICH8 is pretty much forced to include another chip on the motherboard to handle IDE support. Intel isn't getting rid of IDE support; they're just placing the burden of including such support on the motherboard manufacturers. Seriously, how many transistors does it take to support IDE? Perhaps the reason it was removed was to reduce pin counts on the Southbridge, but I doubt it. We're not even asking for anything special in terms of IDE support; just include the same old IDE support that has been present on motherboards for the past decade or so.
jonp - Monday, July 3, 2006 - link
Is the Zalman unit "stock"?
Gary Key - Monday, July 3, 2006 - link
We used the stock retail heatsink for all testing except overclocking. We use the Zalman for overclocking and also tried the Tuniq 120 for fitment issues.