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
Audio Encoding Performance
Our last audio test utilizes Nero Digital Audio to extract all 16 tracks and convert them into an MP4 format. We changed the default quality settings to transcoder-ultra, variable bit rate, encoder quality to high, and the AAC profile to LC in order to properly stress our systems.
These results have left us impressed with the performance of the Abit AB9 Pro and the Intel P965 chipset considering our beta BIOS on this board. The Abit board is about 3% faster in this benchmark over the Asus board at the same memory settings and finishes first overall. It is obvious that the CPU/memory subsystem performance of the P965 is excellent considering the high memory latencies.
File Compression Performance
In order to save space on our hard drives and ensure we had another CPU crunching utility, we will be reporting our file compression results with the latest beta version of WinRAR that fully supports multi-threaded operations and should be of particular interest for those users with dual core or multi-processor systems. Our series of file compression tests utilizes WinRAR 3.60b5 to compress our test folder that contains 444 files, ten subfolders, and 602MB worth of data. All default settings are utilized in WinRAR along with our hard drive being defragmented before each test.
The results speak for themselves with the Intel P965 based system outperforming our previous best scores with the NVIDIA chipset by 14% in the decompression tasks and by 51% over the i975X system at the same settings. We have contacted Asus about the results as we believe this to be a potential BIOS or timing issue and not a true reflection of the i975X chipset based on other results. However, we see the i975X system finishing in front in the grueling compression test (3% faster) over the NVIDIA board, and the Asus board barely trailed the Abit board at equalized memory settings. Once again, we ran the test several times with the same results. The decompression tests are generally more limited by storage system performance whereas the compression tests stress the memory subsystem more in our benchmarks. It will be interesting to see how the Abit AB9 Pro performs once we have a BIOS that allows changes to the memory settings.
Our last audio test utilizes Nero Digital Audio to extract all 16 tracks and convert them into an MP4 format. We changed the default quality settings to transcoder-ultra, variable bit rate, encoder quality to high, and the AAC profile to LC in order to properly stress our systems.
These results have left us impressed with the performance of the Abit AB9 Pro and the Intel P965 chipset considering our beta BIOS on this board. The Abit board is about 3% faster in this benchmark over the Asus board at the same memory settings and finishes first overall. It is obvious that the CPU/memory subsystem performance of the P965 is excellent considering the high memory latencies.
File Compression Performance
In order to save space on our hard drives and ensure we had another CPU crunching utility, we will be reporting our file compression results with the latest beta version of WinRAR that fully supports multi-threaded operations and should be of particular interest for those users with dual core or multi-processor systems. Our series of file compression tests utilizes WinRAR 3.60b5 to compress our test folder that contains 444 files, ten subfolders, and 602MB worth of data. All default settings are utilized in WinRAR along with our hard drive being defragmented before each test.
The results speak for themselves with the Intel P965 based system outperforming our previous best scores with the NVIDIA chipset by 14% in the decompression tasks and by 51% over the i975X system at the same settings. We have contacted Asus about the results as we believe this to be a potential BIOS or timing issue and not a true reflection of the i975X chipset based on other results. However, we see the i975X system finishing in front in the grueling compression test (3% faster) over the NVIDIA board, and the Asus board barely trailed the Abit board at equalized memory settings. Once again, we ran the test several times with the same results. The decompression tests are generally more limited by storage system performance whereas the compression tests stress the memory subsystem more in our benchmarks. It will be interesting to see how the Abit AB9 Pro performs once we have a BIOS that allows changes to the memory settings.
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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.