Review: ABIT AA8 DuraMAX

Overclocking and Thoughts

This was the most disappointing part of the AA8 experience. Despite a wide range of Vdimm, Vcore and Vddq adjustments that would put 99.9% of motherboards to shame, the chipset absolutely would not run faster than 210MHz, regardless of any setting. 210MHz was fine, 211MHz+ would result in no boot at all, a corrupted display or a hung POST screen with a couple of characters on it.

Hrmph. While rumours abound of a 10% chipset lock limit, that's 220MHz by my book, so the 5% limit I apparently hit is a curious one. While I don't want to give the game away with ABIT's AG8 until it gets its own review, my AG8 sample has similar problems too.

Whether it's BIOS teething troubles, or a more permanent hardware limitation, I'm not sure. But with two new LGA775 ABIT boards affected on different (but similar) chipsets, it's an uneasy feeling to describe problems overclocking an ABIT mainboard product.

We'll keep you posted.

Thoughts

My first look at an LGA775 board other than the Intel D925XCV has been very mixed. Great ABIT presentation and the full gamut of new platform features, marred by performance that was slightly below par and overclocking that was non-existant.

There's a little to smile about though. The Matrix Storage is excellent and ABIT use Realtek's seemingly brilliant (without a proper analysis at this point in time) ALC880 HD Audio CODEC.

There's plenty of FireWire400 and USB2.0 and the bundle doesn't skimp on what you need to make use of the board, populating all four SATA ports included.

However, the new platform's inherent downsides all manifest themselves with the AA8, given that it implements absolutely everything new. DDR-II is underwhelming, scarce and more expensive than DDR, PCI Express graphics cards are rarer than rocking horse poop and LGA775 CPUs are either hot, rare and expensive (3.6 P4 560), or not worth bothering about since they already exist on Socket 478, a socket that has many a brilliant motherboard.

The new P4 platform, in the AA8's form, just doesn't make any practical sense at this moment in time.

I'd seriously advise you stick with Socket 478 unless you have money to burn, patience when waiting for graphics cards or you absolutely must have the benefits of Matrix Storage and HD Audio. The AMD side of the fence is incredibly attractive too.

There's no doubt it's a forward looking shift in the P4 platform, but are consumers going to wait until it blossoms, or be tempted now by the likes of the AA8? For the latter, my personal opinion is a definite no.

Notes

Since I completed this article a couple of weeks ago, The Tech Report have reviewed the AA8 using a brand new BIOS that seems to cure its overclocking ills, while unleashing a tiny amount of extra baseline performance. Given that BIOS, the AA8 deserves a higher score than I initially gave it, so the new score appears below.