Abit mobos revisited

At Intel's launch of the 3.6GHz "socket T 775", Abit had two boards ready and chucked them my way to review them. We did sort of preview here but here is the complete part.

P4 560 3.6 GHz socket T 775 pins - not

When I talk about the "new" Intel Pentium 4 I have to say that a lot of things have changed from ye olde socket 478 days. This socket was actually with us for a long time, and even started meriting the tag "traditional". But now Chipzilla has decided to change pretty much everything. You pretty much have to change everything to upgrade to this one.

As for the CPU we have already bored you to tears about this one in the middle of May, one month away from the "lifting of the NDA veil", but we will repeat that this CPUs has 775 connections and that the socket has the pins. We still think it's very fragile and the socket comes with a plastic cover that is supposed to prevent some pin bending. Scary stuff.

Abit AG8 Grantsdale 915P board

AG8 is board based on 915 P chipset and still uses DDR 1 memory. This chipset is actually the same as 925P also known as Alterwood. Both Alterwood and Grantsdale can use DDR1 and DDR 2 memory and both of them are actually using PCI-E graphic slot only. No AGP here. Elvis have left the building.

This motherboard still uses PCI slot and apart of them have three PCI-E 1X slots twice as faster than traditional PCI slots but still without any possible cards to plug in. You still have two PCI slots on board.

You get nice 1 Gbit Realtek card as well as Realtek audio card with 5.1 support and both SPDIF ins and outs.

You will find only one IDE connector on the board and you will be limited to only two old devices. Sometimes that is simply not enough especially in the case when you use IDE CD/DVD drive like we all do and IDE disk that still most of us does.

As for SATA you have possibility to plug four devices and we are sure they would work fine but we simply didn't had any SATA drives to try it with. The only one we have in lab we use for storage.

Abit uses LED display on board with two digits or numbers on it that can help you diagnose what went wrong with the board when you overclocking or just having normal troubles. This is very useful tools if you are the one that like to know what is happening with machine all the time. Its also extremely useful tool for overclocking. We where use to see this at Epox motherboards but now with this Guru trend its Abit stuff as well. Its good stuff so we can not blame them for coping it.

When you machine hangs you almost every time knows what went wrong.

You still have traditional two PS2 ports and good old Printer and one com port, four USB's and Firewire port.

Abit likes to cool its chipset actively at least Northbridge that have eye pleasing bluish cooler on top of it while Southbridge sometimes leaky ICH6 have blue passive cooler on top. Both of the does the job.

You get your power from 24 pin PSU connector where you of course have to connect your PSU but as its almost impossible to get 24 pins PSU now you can use 20 pins that will work just fine. Small 3 pin connector remains on this boards as well.

This time we where cheating and used Akasa 20 pin PSU, with black 12 CM cooler and very low noise, the one that have converter that converts your 20 pins connector and makes to 24 pins from it. It works perfectly and it works even without this converter so just good old 20 pin PSU. What a mess. This PSU with its 460W was extremely good solution and match for this machine, will cost your 60 squid.

We where able to set 5-2-2-2 settings with Corsair new 3200LL modules and board was rock stabile all the time.

AG8 uses Guru architecture but we will talk more about it below with Alterwood AA8 board.

Abit AG8 Alterwood 925 board

AG8 and AA8 resto AG8 is board based on 915 P chipset and still uses DDR 1 memory. This chipset is actually the same as 925P also known as Alterwood. Both Alterwood and Grantsdale can use DDR1 and DDR 2 memory and both of them are actually using PCI-E graphic slot only. No AGP here. Elvis have left the building.

This motherboard still uses PCI slot and apart of them have three PCI-E 1X slots twice as faster than traditional PCI slots but still without any possible cards to plug in. You still have two PCI slots on board.

You get nice 1 Gbit Realtek card as well as Realtek audio card with 5.1 support and both SPDIF ins and outs.

You will find only one IDE connector on the board and you will be limited to only two old devices. Sometimes that is simply not enough especially in the case when you use IDE CD/DVD drive like we all do and IDE disk that still most of us does.

As for SATA you have possibility to plug four devices and we are sure they would work fine but we simply didn't had any SATA drives to try it with. The only one we have in lab we use for storage.

Abit uses LED display on board with two digits or numbers on it that can help you diagnose what went wrong with the board when you overclocking or just having normal troubles. This is very useful tools if you are the one that like to know what is happening with machine all the time. Its also extremely useful tool for overclocking. We where use to see this at Epox motherboards but now with this Guru trend its Abit stuff as well. Its good stuff so we can not blame them for coping it.

When you machine hangs you almost every time knows what went wrong.

You still have traditional two PS2 ports and good old Printer and one com port, four USB's and Firewire port.

Abit likes to cool its chipset actively at least Northbridge that have eye pleasing bluish cooler on top of it while Southbridge sometimes leaky ICH6 have blue passive cooler on top. Both of the does the job.

You get your power from 24 pin PSU connector where you of course have to connect your PSU but as its almost impossible to get 24 pins PSU now you can use 20 pins that will work just fine. Small 3 pin connector remains on this boards as well.

This time we where cheating and used Akasa 20 pin PSU, with black 12 CM cooler and very low noise, the one that have converter that converts your 20 pins connector and makes to 24 pins from it. It works perfectly and it works even without this converter so just good old 20 pin PSU. What a mess. This PSU with its 460W was extremely good solution and match for this machine, will cost your 60 squid.

We where able to set 5-2-2-2 settings with Corsair new 3200LL modules and board was rock stabile all the time.

AG8 uses Guru architecture but we will talk more about it below with Alterwood AA8 board.

Test

We used:
Abit AG8 Guru 915P motherboard
Corsair DDR 400 CL 2-5-2-2 memory
Maxtor IDE 80 GB hard drive due lack of SATA drives
Nvidia NV45GT, Geforce 6800 GT clocked at 350/ 1000 MHz
Akasa PSU
Intel reference 775 cooler
and
Abit AA8 Guru 925P motherboard
Corsair DDR2 533 CL 4-14-4-4 memory

I have to admit that working with Intel cooler is not an easy thing and its far from easy to mount or replace it. All my fingers where hurting me today because I had to remove this cooler more then few times. Push and turn is all you have to do but many times if you don't do it very precisely machine just shut downs since copper is not touching the CPU completely and CPU overheats and shuts machine down. Other problem with this cooler is that its extremely noisy during 3D graphics test and heavy load testing. Hope that market will offer new more quiet cooler for this CPU. Still it was able to keep this 115 W heat dissipating CPU between 50 and 60 o Celsius, which was not that bad. I just hate coolers that have different rotating speeds that depends from heat, I like to have my noise constant. Geforce 6800GT PCI-E had the same issues as it can get noisier when it plays heavy 3D. Make it constant Nvidia we like that more.

NV45GT, Geforce 6800 GT is interesting card with this nice little SLI connector on top and funny little 3x2 power connector kindly provided by Nvidia for a test with the card. It was cool to see Nalu demo running on this machine, she just looks so great, from technology side of course. We didn't test Shader 3.0 feature that Nvidia likes so much we will do this some other time and compare this part with ATI ones.

Results

As you can see in many cases AA8 and its fancy Alterwood - DDR 2 combination gets slower then AG8 and its Grantsdale - DDR 1 cheaper combination. I wondered why that could be and then thought that this could be easily resulted due memory timings on Alterwood are not so great as you can get them with slower DDR1. Now it finally makes sense why many Jedec members opposed DDR 400 for so long time. Still DDR 2 533 platform on AA8 will get little bit faster in many cases.

Conclusion

Both boards are almost identical and DDR2 vs. DDR 1 is the only difference. Its still hard to justify necessity for DDR 2 when all you will get is marginal performance increase in some times while in other testes you will match DDR1 based Grantsdale speeds or AG8, DDR 1 board will be even faster.

We expect this to change with DDR2 667 MHz that Corsair is shipping at the moment but 533 DDR 2 didn't make that much difference.

I guess that if you have decent amount of quality DDR memory you would like to stick with AG8 for a while more or if you are performance user and wants the best Alterwood with DDR 2 based AA8 would be your choice for money of course.

As for AG8 and AA8 we are talking about top motherboards for gamers and overclockers and all other users that wants to have control over the board, are not afraid to do some overclocking and have rock stabile board at the same time.

We find lack of second IDE controller could be limitation factor for users like us but its time to switch to SATA anyway so you should be fine. We prefer passively cooled chipsets to decide the noise but for overclocking I guess you need more then passive sink on chipset.

As for Pentium 4 560 clocked at 3.6 GHz its obviously faster then 3.2 GHz Northwood or Prescott or 775 3.2 GHz that we tested back in May but not by that far. We will test this baby against Athlon XP 3800+ with AGP NV45GT and will try to compare apples with apples as much as possible.

As for memory Corsair makes some of the world finest memory modules and we could see that the one that we tested where one of them.

In any case if you buy this CPU or the boards you will be fastest kid on the block. At least one of them. µ