GAMING PERFORMANCE:
We benchmarked gaming performance with some of the latest and most demanding versions of contemporary 3D games: “Half Life 2”, “Doom 3” and “Far Cry”. In addition we ran the popular “3DMark2005” benchmark. Since the arrival of the A64, AMD has been ahead in gaming performance. Intel’s recently released 6xx processor series has reduced AMD’s lead a little, but cannot entirely close the gap, as we have recently shown in our 6xx series review. The results with the 925XE boards therefore do not come as a surprise.
Again we can see that all three Intel boards perform essentially the same. The differences are minor and well within the margin of error. Most important here is that the AN8 with the A64 FX55 keeps a clear lead in all three games. This is particularly painful for ABIT because the AA8XE Fatal1ty is aimed at gaming enthusiasts. In 3DMark2005 the 925XE boards manage to outrun the FX55, but that result is pretty irrelevant because the situation in actual games looks so much different.
OVERCLOCKING AND STABILITY:
For our overclocking test we pitched the AA8XE against the P5AD2-E. Intel’s D925XECV2 is left out because it is limited to a 10% FSB increase - far below what we expected to achieve with the ABIT and ASUS offerings. To take the processor as much as possible out of the equation we used liquid cooling. Our first objective was to find out the maximum processor and front-side-bus frequency that would allow us to boot into Windows XP and run some basic tests – regardless of long-term system stability.
The result: Both mainboards booted into Windows at around 4.80 GHz. The CPU voltage had to be increased to 1.65 volt to achieve this. At 4.80 GHz Sandra 2005 shows a memory bandwidth of almost 8500 MB/sec and the calculation of 1 million digits with SuperPi takes only 26 seconds.
More serious benchmarks were not possible because both systems were unstable at 4.80 GHz. Even increasing the CPU voltage up to 1.75 volt would not help. The fact that the 3.73 GHz overclocked the same on both mainboards could indicate that this processor was the limit and not the mainboard circuitry or BIOS. It also seems that in terms of maximum frequency headroom the OTES cooling system and other features aiming at overclocking like the OCStrips implemented on the AA8XE do not provide an immediate benefit.
All original content copyright James Rolfe.
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