System setup and notes
Hardware and Software
Test Platforms
| ABIT Fatal1ty System | Intel i925XE System | NVIDIA nForce4 SLI Intel Edition System | Athlon 64 S939 PCI-Express System | |
| Processor(s) | Intel Pentium 4 660 | Intel Pentium 4 660 | Intel Pentium 4 660 | AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 |
| Mainboard | ABIT Fatal1ty AA8XE i925XE | EPoX EP-5LWA+ 925XE | NVIDIA nForce4 SLI Intel Edition | ABIT AX8 K8T890 |
| Memory | 1GByte (2x512MB) Crucial Ballistix DDR2-667 | 1GByte (2x512MB) Crucial Ballistix DDR2-667 | 1GByte (2x512MB) Crucial Ballistix DDR2-667 | 1GByte (2x512MB) Corsair XMS3200 | Memory timings | 4-4-4-12 | 4-4-4-12 | 4-4-4-12 | 2-2-2-5 1T |
| Graphics Card | ATI RADEON X850 XT PE - PEG16X - CATALYST 5.3 | Disk Drive | 160GB WD IDE & 36GB SATA Raptor | |
| BIOS Version | BIOS 14 - 23rd March 2005 | 23rd February 2005 | BIOS 10 - 25th February 2005 | |
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional, SP2 | |||
| Mainboard Software | Intel INF Update Utility 6.3.0.1007 | Intel INF Update Utility 6.3.0.1007 | nForce4 7.02 platform driver | VIA Hyperion Pro v4.55 |
Benchmark Software
HEXUS.in-house Cryptography Benchmark
HEXUS Pifast Benchmark
ScienceMark 2.0 (7th February 2005)
Realstorm 2004
CINEBENCH 2003 multi-CPU render
HEXUS.in-house MP3 Encoding Benchmark using LAME 3.97a (Intel HT compiler) - 701MB WAV
picCOLOR 32-bit v4.0
Kribibench v1.1.9
Microsoft Movie Maker 2.1
USB2.0 transfer test
DOOM 3 Timedemo 1
3DMark2001SE b330
UT2003 Bot Match
Notes
EPoX's established 5LWA+ i925XE and a reference Pentium 4 nForce4 SLI motherboard are obvious choices for evaluating the performance merits of ABIT's Fatal1ty AA8XE. Further, an ABIT AX8 (VIA K8T890) provides the foundation to run AMD's Athlon 64 FX-53 CPU, which is now better known as the Athlon 64 4000+. It's a fair comparison, too, as both Pentium 4 660 and Athlon 64 4000+ retail at around the £350 mark.
No problems to report during installation and a weekend of testing. All devices were installed correctly from the supplied CD, and stability was excellent at both 200MHz FSB and 266MHz FSB; the i925XE chipset's rated speed. Benchmarks were run three times and the highest and lowest results were discarded.
Motherboards' FSB clocks and overall CPU speeds were as follows:
3630.8MHz - EPoX 5LWA+ i925XE - Intel Pentium 4 660
3619.5MHz - ABIT Fatal1ty AA8XE i925XE - Intel Pentium 4 660
3608.5MHz - NVIDIA nForce4 SLI Intel Edition - Intel Pentium 4 660
2405.4MHz -ABIT AX8 VIA K8T890 - AMD Athlon 64 FX-53