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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Anemone - Monday, July 3, 2006 - link
Yes this is quite interesting, thank you very much Anand and Gary!Things are heating up and getting very interesting. As the windup to Conroe gets underway a lot of folks are out buying mobo's now. I want to see more testing first, not really being yet committed more to the 975 or the 590. Have to be honest and say the 590 is proving to be more than I thought it was, but that's a good thing.
Thus I'm taking all this information in, and am grateful for your previews!
Calin - Monday, July 3, 2006 - link
If the supply of Conroe processors will be much lower than the demand, one can expect the mainboard prices to decrease - if the supply of mainboards will be much higher than the supply of retail Conroe processors. So, buying mainboards in advance might prove a not so good idea.mine - Monday, July 3, 2006 - link
most interesting reading of the last 4 weeksthis 965 vs. 975
thanks anand