Abit AB9 Pro: A sneak peek at Intel's new P965 chipset

Media Encoding Performance

For media encoding, our first test is quite easy - we take our original Office Space DVD and use AnyDVD Ripper to copy the full DVD to the hard drive without compression, thus providing an almost exact duplicate of the DVD. We then fire up Nero Recode 2, select our Office Space copy on the hard drive, and perform a shrink operation to allow the entire movie along with extras to fit on a single 4.5GB DVD disc. We left all options on their defaults except we checked off the advanced analysis option. The scores reported include the full encoding process and is represented in minutes, with lower numbers indicating better performance.


The results left us amazed with the Abit P965 board scoring 7% better than the Asus i975X board at the same memory settings while still bettering our NVIDIA board that placed first in our previous tests. We ran the benchmark several times and verified our settings before accepting the test results. It will be interesting to see if this pattern continues with other P965 based boards.

Audio Encoding Performance

While the media encoding prowess of the Abit AB9 Pro was superb in our initial media encoding testing, we wanted to see how it fared on the audio side. Our audio test suite consists of Exact Audio Copy v095.b4, LAME 3.98a3, LAME MT3.97a-MS Compiler, and Nero Digital Audio. We utilize the INXS Greatest Hits CD that contains 16 tracks totaling 606MB of one time '80s hits.

Our first test consists of utilizing Exact Audio Copy as the front end for our differing versions of LAME. We set up EAC for variable bit rate encoding, burst mode for extraction, use external program for compression, and to start the external compressor upon extraction. (EAC will read the next track while LAME is working on the previous track, thus removing a potential bottleneck with the optical drive.)

Our two versions of LAME consist of the recently released 3.98a3 and LAME MT 3.97a, which is a multi-threaded version of the LAME MP3 encoder. LAME MT was originally designed as a demonstration to show the advantages of multi-threading on the Pentium 4 with Hyper-Threading enabled. Instead of running multiple parallel threads, LAME MT generates the encoder's psycho-acoustic analysis function in a separate thread from the rest of the encoder using a simple linear pipeline. The results are presented in minutes for the encoding process, with lower numbers being better.



As in the media encoding section, the more intensive CPU and storage system tests seem to favor the P965 over the i975X when running at the same memory timings and are near that of the two results at lower memory timings. Even at this early stage we see some benefits of the reworked/enhanced memory controller on the P965. When utilizing LAME MT we see upwards of a 35% improvement in encoding times. This once again shows the advantages of programs written to take advantage of multiple-core processors.