ABOUT BENCH FORUMS PODCAST LOGIN REGISTER
PC Components
Smartphones & tablets
Systems
ENTERPRISE & IT
GUIDES

Abit NI8 SLI: nVidia SLI for the Intel Gamer

 by Randi Sica & Wesley Fink on October 7, 2005 12:05 AM EST
19 Comments | Add A Comment
19 Comments
ABIT NI8 SLI: Feature Set (Cont'd)

One of the highlights of this board is the "Silent OTES" cooling solution for the C19 Northbridge. It is an ABIT engineered heatpipe technology. Heat generated by the chipset is noiselessly conducted to the back panel radiator. It does its job very well, but because of the "egg frying heat" generated by the C19 Northbridge, you will definitely want to make sure that you have adequate airflow inside your case. The ABIT uses a non-adjustable 1.4V to its Northbridge, and it is a puzzle that Abit didn't provide the option to go higher. Though the Silent OTES does an admirable job, it is overwhelmed by the considerable heat generated. The OTES concept itself appears to be a good idea, but in this application, an active addition to the party providing some airflow would be welcomed.

ABIT has also included a Post Code debug LED, which can be very useful when trying to diagnose your system out of a problem situation, such as a no boot. An add-in debug card has been part of my test setup for many years and it has been useful in many difficult troubleshooting situations to be able to track and correct a post malfunction.

Continuing ABIT's practice concerning its build quality, including the highest quality Nichicon capacitors in the CPU power section lends itself to unrivaled stability in CPU voltage. No notable fluctuations were observed even when the system was being stressed heavily. The Power section is the now familiar 4 Phase design, and they have included a heatsink to assist in cooling the MOSFETS. In this arrangement of MOSFET heatsink and Silent OTES "radiator", air moving from the CPU heatsink/fan assists in providing some airflow across both. This seems to be adequate, but in my experience with this iteration of Silent OTES, it does become overwhelmed by the heat from the C19 northbridge Anyone purchasing this board should add some supplemental active cooling to prevent long term heat-induced problems.

The I/O panel contains the usual cast of characters including 4 USB 2.0 ports and the Gigabit LAN port. This also provides another view of the Silent OTES radiator.

There have been many methods implemented by manufacturers since the introduction of the SLI chipset in facilitating the switch, which changes video modes from normal to SLI. ABIT has chosen to utilize a small card, which is held in by spring clips. You merely release it, flip it over and reinstall it. In the photo above, it is in "normal" single card mode.


In this photo, the board is switched to dual card "SLI" mode.

This is ABIT's audio solution for the NI8 SLI, the AudioMAX 7.1. By design, it locates the audio chip and associated electronics on the separate PCB to "reduce the amount of noise created by high frequency generated on the mainboard." This installs in a dedicated audio slot next to the LAN/USB port that looks like a backwards PCIe x1 slot. The card includes an S/PDIF out along with S/PDIF/Line in, and all connections necessary to provide 7.1 sound. It relies on the Realtek ALC850 chip and the AC'97 7.1 channel codec. Note that this is not an HD Azalia audio solution, and this will be a concern for some users. However, we have encountered some HD Audio implementations that sound worse than AC'97, so we believe the quality of the solution is really the most important factor.

Finally, the hardware package includes 6 SATA cables, floppy and IDE cables along with the SLI bridge connector. ABIT also includes an SLI bracket shown at the bottom right, which is used to support the SLI bridge connector and the 2 SLI graphics cards.

ABIT NI8 SLI: Feature set ABIT NI8 SLI: Overclocking
PRINT THIS ARTICLE
Comments Locked

19 Comments

View All Comments

  • jojo4u - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link

    The graphs give a nice overview, good work.

    Please consider to include the information what AF level was used into the graphs. This is something all recent reviews here have have been lacking.

    About the image quality: The shimmering was greatly reduced with the fixed driver (78.03). So it's down to NV40 level now. But 3dCenter.de[1] and Computerbase.de conclude that only enabling "high quality" in the Forceware brings comparable image quality to "A.I. low". Perhaps you find the time to explore this issue in the image quality tests.

    [1] http://www.3dcenter.de/artikel/g70_flimmern/index_...">http://www.3dcenter.de/artikel/g70_flimmern/index_...
    This article is about the unfixed quality. But to judge the G70 today, have a look at the 6800U videos.
    http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=1549&am...">http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=1549&am...
    This article shows the performance hit of enabling "high quality"

  • jojo4u - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link

    oops wrong forum

  • Avalon - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link

    Thanks for the clarification Wesley, and welcome aboard Randi!

  • Wesley Fink - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link

    Please welcome Randi Sica as our newest reviewer at AnandTech. Randi is a friend who is well known in the Extreme Overclocking community as Mr. Icee. That gives Randi a keen eye when looking at what's right and wrong with a motherboard from an Extreme Overclocker's perspective.

    We think you will also find Randi's review perspective and approach a little different. Those who have been screaming for overclocked benchmarks in board reviews will find them in Randi's reviews.

    This is Randi's first review at AnandTech, so please make him feel welcomed.

  • yacoub - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link

    PASSIVELY COOLED! That's soooo appealing. I wish board makers could get the northbridges cool enough on the AMD chipset to make more passively cooled boards. I hate having another fan in the case, especially a tiny one running at high revs making a racket. It's bad enough most GPUs suffer from that, we don't need another one on the mobo. :(

  • DigitalFreak - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link

    Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I don't think the audio is on the PCI-E bus. The codec hangs directly off the southbridge, and isn't on any bus. If you look at the slot the audio card goes in, it's actually a PCI-E 1x connector turned backwards. I'm assuming that they use that particular connector because it's cheaper than designing something custom. Still, not a bad job on the CPU utilization.

    BTW, the chip is an ALC850, not ACL850 as mentioned on page 3.

  • Wesley Fink - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link

    Thanks for pointing this out. The references to the audio connector have been corrected to "dedicated audio connector" which it is unless we hear otherwise from Abit. We have seen the separate dedicated audio card can significantly reduce CPU overhead, and Abit seems to have done well with this idea on this board.

  • Live - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link

    Enough said...

  • Avalon - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link

    quote:
    The superior Workstation performance demonstrated here involves two parts: the ABIT NI8 SLI coupled to the D840 EE Dual core P4. The other boards compared here feature a standard single core solution


    Wait, what? You are comparing a dual core HT enabled system with several other Intel systems using only a single core? How is this apples to apples? This makes all of the benchmarks you did worthless.

  • Wesley Fink - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link

    ALL tests used the exact same CPU except the Workstation test results. That means general performance, encoding, DX9, and DX8 gaming were tested on all reported platforms with the Pentium D 840EE.

    The Workstation Tests were included because they were an interesting picture of a 3.6GHz single core being soundly outperformed by a 3.2GHz dual-core Pentium D. The workstation tests were meant to be an illustration, not a direct comparison.

    The 3.46EE was used in some past memory tests to achieve high memory bus speeds, and the reference was only made in examing overclocked memory FSB speed records - not comparative performance.

    We will make this clearer in the review, but all of the benchmarks except Worksation are definitely apples to apples tests - even down to HT being enabled in all tests.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved.
BENCH
TOPICS
FOLLOW
ABOUT

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now