Abit AB9-Pro: Mainstream P965 Performance and Pricing

Basic Performance

The performance of the board was at times in the upper segment of our roundup but mainly stayed near its performance twin, the Biostar TForce 965 Deluxe. We found the board to be a very consistent performer and extremely stable up to its current limit. We cannot say that we have reached the true limit of this board, and we await further BIOS optimizations. As with recent Abit boards we expect to see significant BIOS tuning for the performance oriented crowd after stability and/or incompatibility issues have been resolved.

This board supports up to 2.3V on the memory, which allows a fair amount of overclocking headroom with most DDR2 memory. However, we would like to see 2.4V or higher in a board of this caliber. The BIOS we tested only allows changes to four memory timing settings (the typical CAS, tRCD, tRP, tRAS values). We expect to see additional options as the BIOS matures. We believe overall that this board is a great value currently and offers what appears to be a great blend of performance and options when compared to our roundup boards. We expect great things out of Abit if they are able to release a stable yet performance oriented BIOS for this board quickly.

Overclocking

Abit AB9-Pro
Overclocking Testbed
Processor:	Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 Dual Core, 2.67GHz, 4MB Unified Cache 1066FSB, 10x Multiplier
CPU Voltage:	1.525V (default 1.2V)
Cooling:	Tuniq Tower 120 Air Cooling
Power Supply:	OCZ GameXStream 700W
Memory:	Corsair Twin2X2048-PC2-8500C5 (2x1GB) (Micron Memory Chips)
Hard Drive	Hitachi 250GB 7200RPM SATA2 16MB Cache
Maximum OC: (Standard Ratio)	366x10 (3-3-3-9, 1:1) 3660MHz (+37%)

We were pleasantly surprised by our overclocking results on this board, but just like some of our other P965 boards we had to gradually increase the FSB speeds in order to reach this level. Abit has informed us they are near a 400 FSB in their internal testing and expect to exceed this level shortly with targets set to reaching 450+ FSB speeds. When we installed our X6800 and started testing for maximum FSB overclocking we were treated with a 9x369 result that indicates our board is at is limits currently. Hopefully the next BIOS will reward us with higher overclocks, though we might simply discover that the FSB ceiling on our particular board is about 370.

Test Setup

Performance Test Configuration
Processor:	Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (X2, 2.67GHz, 4MB Unified Cache)
RAM:	2 x 1GB Corsair Twin2X2048-8500C5 Tested at DDR2-800 3-3-3-9 2.2V
Hard Drive:	Hitachi 250GB SATA2 enabled (16MB Buffer)
System Platform Drivers	Intel - 8.0.1.1002 NVIDIA - 6.86
Video Cards:	1 x EVGA 7900GTX - All Standard Tests
Video Drivers:	NVIDIA 91.31
CPU Cooling:	Tuniq Tower 120
Power Supply:	OCZ GameXstream 700W
Motherboards:	ASUS P5W-DH Deluxe (Intel 975X) Intel 975XBX (Intel 975X) Abit AB9-Pro (Intel P965) ASUS P5B Deluxe (Intel P965) ASUS P5N32-SLI (nF4 SLIX16 Intel) Biostar TForce P965 Deluxe (Intel P965) Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 (Intel P965) DFI Infinity 975X/G (Intel 975X) ASRock 775Dual-VSTA (VIA PT880 PRO)
Operating System:	Windows XP Professional SP2

Test conditions were maintained the same, as much as possible, over the platforms tested. For better comparison standard test results (1280x1024) were run with a single NVIDIA 7900GTX on all platforms. Our high resolution game tests were run at settings of 1600x1200 4xAA/8xAF with our 7900GTX card. All results are reported in our charts and color-coded for easier identification of results. All Core 2 Duo benchmarking used Corsair PC-8500 (DDR2-1066) 2GB kit at 3-3-3 timings at 2.2V. In recent months the memory market has moved from a 1GB kit to a 2BG kit being the common memory configuration. Our new DDR2 test standard is 2GB.