Abit AB9 QuadGT High-FSB Testing
05.14.07 - 03:26pm
As I promised in the original review of the QuadGT, I have strapped a phase-change system to my QuadGT to see how it responds to 500+FSB clockspeeds. I was really hoping for ~550MHz FSB out of the box with this board as I’m not a fan of volt-modding my hardware but it might come down to that if I want to go any higher. From 266MHz up to 500MHz FSB with my E6400 the QuadGT pulled great clocks with astonishing voltages but past 500MHz it goes downhill in a hurry. Considering how the realm of 450+FSB isn’t an area frequented by the average individual my observations should be taken with a grain of salt. Those of you looking for some extreme clocking should however absorb what I have to say.
The BIOS options within the QuadGT are so plentiful that one would think high FSB clocking would be a simply flick of a few settings and voila, success. Sadly the QuadGT isn’t quite that simple, I did what I do when I’m breaking all boards in, max out all the mobo voltages, set VDIMM to 2.3V, and VCORE to 1.6V and threw the FSB to 500MHz and it booted up just fine. With my hardware and these voltages a FSB of ~540 should have been possible as the identical hardware did 540FSB on my DS3. Anything past 520FSB threw serious errors within SuperPI 32M though, honestly anything past 510FSB was unstable in my opinion. I don’t know if my E6400 is dying, if there is condensation in the socket, or if the motherboard just has a stiff FSB wall but no matter what I did I couldn’t boot into windows at 520FSB and complete a dual 32M run, single 1M works fine but anything past that and the system crashes. Performing dual-1M runs resulted in Core 1 failing, Core 0 was 32M stable up to 520FSB. Normally I’d point my finger first at the memory but my D9GMH has been capable of DDR2-1100 speeds with less volts. Cooling also isn’t an issue as the system is currently running dual 32M @ 4000MHz with a die temperature of -27 celsius.
Reading through a few threads on the Internet about this board makes it seem like it’s a great board if you get a good one, I’d say my board is about average but perhaps my expectations are simply too high. Thankfully 965P is coming to an end with the onset of the P35 Bearlake motherboards hitting the market within the next month or so, looks like it is time to do another upgrade. If you are looking for 550FSB runs out of a current motherboard then I’d suggest checking out the DFI 965-S Dark, I’ve seen multiple instances of 550+FSB with no vmods, the QuadGT is good but it isn’t great.
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