Abit NI8 SLI: nVidia SLI for the Intel Gamer
by Randi Sica & Wesley Fink on October 7, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Test Setup
ALL benchmarks used the Intel Pentium D 840 EE. General Performance, encoding, DX9, and DX8 gaming were tested on all reported platforms with the Pentium D 840EE.
The only exception is in the Workstation test results. For the Workstation tests we only had past results generated with a single core 3.6GHz Pentium 4 560. We compared the 3.2 GHz 840EE on the Abit with past test results of the 3.6GHz 560 to illustrate the strong performance of the slower 3.2GHz dual-core compared to the faster 3.6GHz P4 in standardized Workstation tests.
The 3.46EE was used in some past memory tests to achieve high memory bus speeds, and we refered to those test results only in examing overclocked memory FSB speed records - not comparative performance.
Tests used the Corsair 5400UL aboard the ABIT. Memory ran at 3-2-2-8 1T timing in all benchmarks.
We tested with our standard MSI 7800GTX to allow the best comparisons for benchmark results with other motherboards. Resolution in all benchmarks is 1280x1024x32 unless otherwise noted.
Results for the ABIT NI8 SLI are in colour-coded red in all graphs.
| Performance Test Configuration | |
| Processor(s): | Intel Pentium D 840 EE (3.2GHz, 800FSB, Dual-Core, HT, 2x1MB L2)(HT enabled for all tests) Intel Pentium 4 560 ES (3.6GHz, 800FSB, 1MB L2,HT) Intel 3.46EE (3.46GHz, 1066FSB, HT) |
| RAM: | 2 x 512MB Corsair CM2X512A-5400UL 2 x 512MB OCZ PC2 5400 EB 2 x 1GB Patriot Extreme Performance PEP21G5600+XBL |
| Hard Drive(s): | Western Digital 36GB Raptor 10,000RPM |
| System Drivers: | NVIDIA 7.13 |
| Video Cards: | 2x NVIDIA 6800 Ultra MSI NVIDIA 7800GTX |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA Forceware beta 81.26 (Overclocking Tests) NVIDIA Forceware beta 78.05 (Standard Tests) |
| Operating System(s): | Windows XP Professional SP2 Direct X 9.0c |
| Motherboards: | ABIT NI8 SLI Gigabyte GA-8I955X Royal MSI P4 Diamond Asus P5WD2 Premium (Intel 955x) Asus P5ND2-SLI Deluxe (NVIDIA nForce4 Intel) Asus P5AD2 Premium (Intel 925x) Intel 925x Reference Board |
ALL benchmarks used the Intel Pentium D 840 EE. General Performance, encoding, DX9, and DX8 gaming were tested on all reported platforms with the Pentium D 840EE.
The only exception is in the Workstation test results. For the Workstation tests we only had past results generated with a single core 3.6GHz Pentium 4 560. We compared the 3.2 GHz 840EE on the Abit with past test results of the 3.6GHz 560 to illustrate the strong performance of the slower 3.2GHz dual-core compared to the faster 3.6GHz P4 in standardized Workstation tests.
The 3.46EE was used in some past memory tests to achieve high memory bus speeds, and we refered to those test results only in examing overclocked memory FSB speed records - not comparative performance.
Tests used the Corsair 5400UL aboard the ABIT. Memory ran at 3-2-2-8 1T timing in all benchmarks.
We tested with our standard MSI 7800GTX to allow the best comparisons for benchmark results with other motherboards. Resolution in all benchmarks is 1280x1024x32 unless otherwise noted.
Results for the ABIT NI8 SLI are in colour-coded red in all graphs.
ABIT NI8 SLI - Overclocked 3D benchmark performance + SLI verification
General Performance and Encoding
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19 Comments
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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 forumAvalon - 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
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.