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Abit AB9 QuadGT Review

04.27.07 - 04:10pm

I’ve been such a slacker lately and this review will show it. This interesting board has been in my posession for nearly 7 weeks and I have just gotten around to reviewing it. The QuadGT is Abit’s flagship P965 motherboard with all the features one would expect out of a premium motherboard. While the P965 chipset is hardly a premium chipset compared to the 975X or 680i chipsets, Abit has managed to work wonders with this chipset and create a most interesting motherboard.

Package

The QuadGT shipped in one of the cleanest packages that I have ever seen for a motherboard. The box itself contains your standard image of something flashy, this time it’s an exotic sports car. Otherwise the box is littered with your other standard motherboard images, rewards, capabilities, and features. Ironically ATi Crossfire support is listed along with “Future Proof”, Crossfire on P965 is a joke and there is no such thing as future proof hardware.

Once you open the box up you are greeted with two little boxes that contain your manual, cables, and accessories. Tossing these aside and through another layer finally gets you to the motherboard itself. Nestled within cardboard braces and inside an anti-static bag, the QuadGT was very well protected for any bumps it may have received during shipping. The board itself is a dark shade of blue with black plastic used for all but the primary PCIe connector which is blue. The southbridge features a small copper-colored passively cooled heatsink while the northbridge features a wrap-around heatpipe system. This heatpipe system connects to the digital power regulation on the board which features a large finned heatsink, I assume some of the northbridge heat is meant to be dissipated here. I have my doubts about the abilities of this heatsink solution as in my experience power regulation chips tend to get extremely hot, digital solutions even more so than analog.

The overall layout of this board would be one of the better ones with a few extra features just to liven things up. There are six SATA connectors on the bottom right corner of the board along with 2 e-SATA connections located on the I/O panel. A single IDE connector is located in the bottom right corner on a 90 degree mount and a floppy connector is also located in the same area. Two PCIe x16 connectors, a PCIe x1 connector, and 2 32-bit PCI connectors are situated on the bottom left side of the board. The PCIe x1 connector is situated between the two PCIe x16 connectors, while it makes it possible to use a 2-slot PCIe x16 device, with an x1 device there is very little room meaning that any fans will be blowing air against the x1 card. If for some reason a user decides to Crossfire then one of the 32-bit slots will covered by a 2-slot card which can be an issue for some people with sound and ethernet cards.

On the I/O panel there are four USB 2.0 sockets, 1 Firewire 400 socket, 1 Gigabit ethernet port, 1 optical output, 1 optical input, PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports and your standard 6-point sound I/O panel. Another interesting feature that makes overclocking the QuadGT is the EZ-CMOS jumper located on the I/O panel. Rather than having to remove your PCI and PCIe cards to get to the BIOS reset jumper, Abit has thoughtfully included a secondary jumper that performs the same function with none of the hastle. While I have only used this jumper twice, both times it kept me from hunting for the jumper on the board and removing the various peripherals obstructing my reach.

The DDR2 DIMM slots are located roughly 2 inches from the CPU socket so that large heatsinks won’t obstruct access to these slots. There aren’t any clearance issues with full-length VGAs either, the bottom DIMM release tabs have enough clearance to be fully displaced so there shouldn’t be any issues with swapping out hardware. The only fitting problem I can find isn’t really an issue with the board itself but rather the heatsink chosen. The Scythe Ninja is a very large heatsink and it’s heatpipes curve up out of the socket, occupying a lot of room around the socket. Due to this and the positioning of the socket, when the fan is strapped onto the heatsink facing the top of the board it actually overhangs the board and in small cases this could potentially be in very close proximity of the powersupply or even not fit.

Installation

I haven’t used a computer case in about 8 months however the QuadGT is a standard ATX motherboard and asides from a select few CPU heatsink issues I can’t imagine there being any installation issues. I decided to test the QuadGT with the components from the Lean Machine as these parts have been tested and burned in. All testing was done on my benching station with the ambient temperature hovering around 23 Celsius.

• CPU: Intel E6400 2.13GHz 2MB Cache 28B
• RAM: Crucial 10th Annivesary DDR2-667 2×1GB kit
• VGA: eVGA 7900GTO at 680/820
• PSU: OCZ 700 watt GameXStream
• HDD: 1x Seagate 7200.10 300GB
• MISC: Scythe Ninja Rev B. with Stock 120mm fan, 80mm fan over DIMM/NB

BIOS and Drivers

The P965 chipset has proven to be a rather flexible chipset with budget boards competing with premium boards. One of the biggest differences between these various boards is the BIOS features and the onboard power management, these two features can make or break a motherboard. That being said, the QuadGT easily trumps the Gigabyte DS3 which was previously my favorite P965 board. The BIOS itself is simply loaded with features that make overclocking a breeze. The uGuru Utility will be the section of the BIOS most frequented by overclockers as the FSB, Multiplier, NB Strap, DRAM divider, PCIe clock, voltage control, and temperature/voltage/fan monitoring. The DRAM timings are located outside of the uGuru section which I found unusual but accessing those just involved a few more keystrokes. Voltage options are quite extensive and give the user the option to max out their hardware easily.

• FSB: 133MHz to 600MHz
Multiplier: 6x to CPU Max
• NB Strap: 533, 800, 1066, CPU
• DRAM Divider: 533, 667, 800
• PCIe Clock: 100MHz to 200MHz
• Voltage Options
• VCore: 1.2375V to 1.8375V
• VDIMM: 1.800V to 3.000V
• CPU VTT: 1.20V to 1.50V
• VMCH: 1.25V to 1.70V
• VICH: 1.05V to 1.20V
• VICHIO: 1.50V to 1.70V
• DDR2 Ref Voltage: +2% to -4%
• DRAM Timings
• CAS Latency Time tCL: Auto, 3-6
• RAS to CAS Delay tRCD: Auto, 1-15
• RAS Precharge tRP: Auto, 1-15
• Precharge Delay: Auto, 1-31
• Command Rate: Auto, 1T, 2T
• Refresh Cycle tRFC: Auto, 1-63

As you can see there are just about every value you could desire outside of a DFI BIOS. It would be nice to have DRAM and CPU drive strength options but that’s only relevant for extreme clocks. For the initial bootup I left all the options on auto or default values and the system booted up just fine. After installing Windows XP Professional SP1 I ran a series of benchmarks to form a baseline to compare further values against. During these benchmarks I noticed two things, the CPU temperatures were a good 2-3 degrees lower than on my DS3 with identical voltages, and the NB/PWM heatpipes made a terrible amount of noise. When under load the heatpipes hissed, similar to the noise steam makes in pipes. I suspect inside a case you wouldn’t notice this hissing but when running caseless I can just barely make it out.

I ran into an issue with the audio and ethernet drivers that were provided to me by Abit, they simply weren’t recognized for the hardware installed. Therefore I downloaded the latest NB, Gigabit, and Audio drivers from Abit. The latest NB and Audio drivers worked just fine but the Gigabit drivers were once again unrecognized. I had to manually download the appropriate Realtek Gigabit drivers which were accepted and gave a full-featured board.

Overclocking

Honestly unless you plan on overclocking then it makes little sense to purchase this motherboard. To start things off I left the CPU multiplier at 8x and pushed the FSB to 320MHz and set the DIMM divider to 667 to give me DDR2-800 with 4-4-4-12-2T-35 timings. VDIMM was kept at 2.1V, VCORE bumped to 1.3075V, CPU VTT at 1.5V, VMCH at 1.65V, VICH at 1.20V, VICHIO at 1.65V, and DDR2 Reference Voltage at 0%. The MCH/ICH/VTT/ICHIO voltages are probably excessive however these are the voltages I’ve been running 24/7 and so far I haven’t noticed any performance degradation. Below are the results for 2560MHz, a moderate overclock.

Next up I pushed the FSB to 400MHz, DIMM divider to 533 so that the memory was running at DDR2-800 with 4-4-4-12-2T-35 timings. The VCORE was pushed up to 1.4075V while the other voltage options were kept at the previous values. Now that the PWM was pushing even more power through the socket the heatpipes began to hiss a little bit louder, I’d safely say they were making as much noise as the 120mm fan on the Scythe Ninja. Without the 80mm fan blowing over the Northbridge and indirectly cooling the PWM the temperatures were easily pushing past 70 Celsius on the heatpipe fins and pipes themselves. At stock speeds the heatoutput isn’t so intensive but just at 1.4075V the PWM were heating up the Northbridge excessively, seperate heatsinks would have been a better option.

I would have liked to have tested higher FSB speeds however I found a potentially huge issue in the BIOS, you simply cannot change the CPU multiplier. 6x, 7x, and 8x all resulted in 8x making it impossible for me to easily test any FSB past 400MHz simply due to heat issues. I would have liked to strap my autocascade up to the QuadGT but it’s currently down for a cap-tube modification. I did manage to coax a 500MHz FSB from the QuadGT but it was nowhere near being stable as I was not eager to pump more than 1.4 volts through this processor on aircooling, gotta look out for your golden chips :)

Overclocking Update

Took me a few days but I finally strapped a single-stage phase cooler that I had just built for a test-run on the QuadGT over 500FSB. Tuned for a 250 watt load @ -35 celsius the cooler was more than capable of holding the processor load but the QuadGT really didn’t take to well to 500+FSB runs. Perhaps after I fish through the various BIOS files I can find one that’ll perform better, but it looks like for now the QuadGT walls around 520FSB or atleast my particular board.

Default Results

2560MHz Results

3200MHz Results

4000MHz Suicide Shot

Other Observations

Since I wasn’t able to safely push past a 400MHz FSB the 1T/2T memory timings and NB strap effects weren’t able to be utilized. Once my autocascade is up and running I’ll be exploring the differences between the 1066MHz and 1333MHz Straps between the QuadGT and the DS3. I’ll also be testing how the QuadGT deals with 500+MHz FSBs, my DS3 walls at 540FSB so I have high hopes for 550+MHz runs out of the QuadGT. The voltage regulation is great on this motherboard and it let me routinetly run about .15 volts lower clock for clock compared to my DS3 with it’s cheaper analog PWM. One issue with the PWM on the QuadGT though is the vDroop on the Vcore. It will routinely droop about .175 volts so 1.3075 would really result in 1.290V and 1.4175 dropped down to 1.3975V or so. Not a huge issue but this should be taken into consideration when doing 4GHz+ runs on this board, if you have a Vcore hungry chip then you might wall prematurely due to the 1.8375V limitation on Vcore.

Conclusion

I can’t make a complete decision on how the QuadGT ranks in the world but from these preliminary benchmarks I’d say it’s one of the better P965 boards for benchmarking/overclocking. If you just need a standard board to get you a 400MHz FSB then I’d suggest saving your $50 and picking up a cheaper board but if you need some high FSB runs then the QuadGT should be for you. Once the autocascade is up and running then I’ll be doing some 500+MHz FSB runs and linking the highspeed review to the bottom of these review. The physical layout of the board is very well worked out and did I mention it comes with some wicked backdrop blue LEDs. Solid capacitors + digital PWM + great layout + great bios definitely yield a 8/10, if I can pull a consistent 540FSB and fix the multiplier issue then I’d push this up to a 9/10.

• Pros

• Excellent Power Modulation
• Great Board Layout
• Very Easy BIOS
• User Friendly Overclocking

• Cons

• Heatpipe Cooling Overheats NorthBridge
• Socket Placement Issues With Large Heatsinks
• vDroop Can Be An Issue With Extreme Overclocking

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