Abit AW8

Overclocking:

Since Oscar Wu, the famous BIOS writer, left Abit to pursue his expertise at DFI, we've seen stronger overclocking potential come out of DFI mainly with their nForce4 systems while some have felt the quality of Abit motherboards have been dampened. However, we didn't find this to be a problem with the AW8 when doing some moderate overclocking. Using a retail Pentium D 820 (2.8GHz) and swapping between Corsair's XMS2-5400UL and Crucial's Ballistix PC2-6400 we had absolutely no problems surpassing 250MHz for the FSB, which resulted in the processor running at 3.5GHz (250 x 14); a 700MHz overclock. When raising the processor beyond 250-260MHz, we began experiencing some heat-related issues thus ultimately costing performance and stability. However, if we were to of used water-cooling on this test rig we're certain we could have reached a higher FSB for these toasty Prescotts. Unfortunately, using LM_Sensors 2.9.1 and sensors-detect, we were unsuccessful in our attempts at monitoring the system information for the motherboard such as temperature, fan speed, and voltage monitoring. We believe our attempts with LM_Sensors were foiled due to Abit's proprietary uGuru Technology that isn't yet supported under alternative operating systems.

Performance:

Hitting the bench today, we have the Abit AW8, ASUS P5LD2 Deluxe, and ASRock 775Dual-880Pro. All of these motherboards sport different Chipsets but are all Pentium D compatible and support relatively identical features. Between systems, all of the additional hardware components were kept constant unless otherwise specified. Below are the components that made up this Pentium D + 7800GTX system.

Due to some complications with the ASRock 775Dual-880Pro, which utilizes the VIA PT880 Pro Chipset, and its PCI Express x4 connector we were unable to use the Leadtek 7800GTX graphics card so we opted for a Leadtek 6600GT (PCI Express); unfortunately cutting down on the number of gaming benchmarks. With the ASUS P5LD2 Deluxe (i945), we were able to make use of the 7800GTX but due to the Pentium D and AMI (American Megatrends) BIOS NVIDIA driver flaw, we were unable to use 3D acceleration with NVIDIA's proprietary drivers even when flashing to the latest BIOS. When coming to the Abit AW8, we were extremely pleased to see all components operated without fault, with the exception of LM_Sensors detecting the onboard motherboard sensors. For reference, the Linux 2.6.12 kernel offers support for the Pentium D processors since RC3. The onboard Broadcom BCM5789 10/100/1000 LAN controller worked out-of-the-box with FedoraCore4 using the tg3 driver and the Abit AudioMAX (Realtek ALC882M) worked with the ALSA 1.0.9. As the Abit AW8 passed with excellence in our slew of initial Linux testing, we proceeded to run our arsenal of benchmarks. Due to the previously stated Linux conflicts with the ASUS P5LD2 Deluxe (i945) and ASRock 775Dual-880Pro (PT880), we slimmed down our usual slew of gaming benchmarks to focus more heavily on the CPU/memory stressing. The benchmarks today consisted of timed disk reads, gunzip compression, LAME compilation, LAME encoding, BlueSailSoftware Opstone Sparse-Vector Scalar Product, BlueSailSoftware Opstone Singular Value Decomposition, and FreeBench. As always, all tests were ran three times and the average of the three being recorded.

For an overclocking comparison, we ran Doom 3's time demo at stock speeds (200 x 14) and then again once the CPU was moderately overclocked at 3.36GHz (240 x 14). With a 3:5 (CPU:DRAM) ratio, the Corsair memory was running at DDR2-800 speeds with stock timings.