ABIT AW8-MAX & Gigabyte GA-81955X

Overclocking

As expected, overclocking using ?Guru was exceptional, despite just falling short of matching Gigabyte's top overclock of 4.47GHz the ABIT came in at 4.45GHz, just 6MHz FSB short. However, the memory timings were vastly different with the ABIT only achieving a meagre 4-4-4-12 compared to Gigabytes 4-3-3-8 whilst at a higher speed.

Considering the Gigabyte has twice as much power regulation and a 'more' actively cooled northbridge (i.e. fan directly over the heatsink, rather than singularly heat-piped like the OTES) shows that the ABIT is very well engineered. Not only that, but at 4.45GHz it was stable enough to successfully run through our Xvid encoding test at full loading for nearly twenty minutes (the 3.73 is a Prescott core, air cooled remember) whereas the Gigabyte board failed almost straight away whilst being only slightly faster.

We managed to get a solid 4.5GHz, 324MHz FSB out of the Gigabyte, which was fully test-stable. We could run loops of Doom3 or Far Cry and not have any lockups, yet it wasn't Prime95 torture test stable until we lowered it down to 4.2GHz, 300MHz FSB. Even at these speeds no heatsink was too hot, and all the features still worked perfectly.

The memory multipliers are a definite bonus for those who can afford ultra fast DDR2 recently hitting the market; you could theoretically run the ram at an incredible 1200MHz with a 300MHz CPU bus and the maximum multiplier of 4x. The heatpipe technology on the ABIT Q-OTES works extremely effectively, the northbridge not becoming more than quite warm to the finger throughout.

Even though we were using Corsair PC2-5400UL in the ABIT board, we found it didn't like timings outside those of SPD when overclocking, which were being recorded lower than when equivalently clocked on the Gigabyte board. Even when changing the CPU divider from 1:1 to 4:5, it would overclock reliably but outside of SPD settings it wouldn't like it.

Hopefully this issue will be addressed in future BIOS revisions, but all we can say for now is that even if you buy low latency ram to go with your ABIT AW8-MAX board, it's not guaranteed to run low latency speeds. It's best to spend your money on faster memory with higher timings so you have a) the greater guaranteed overhead that the board is capable of with the memory dividers, and when ABIT sort the BIOS out, b) low latency memory if you decide to 'underclock' it.

Final Thoughts...

There is no clear winner across the board when discussing performance, both Gigabyte and ABIT boards have their slight strengths against the other and even when overclocking the Gigabyte could pull out slightly more at faster memory timings but the ABIT was significantly more stable at only 6MHz FSB slower.

Both motherboards support Dolby's Master Studio with the Realtek ALC882M audio codec, whether you prefer to have the AudioMAX daughter board at the bottom of your case on the ABIT or at the more normal place of rear I/O panel on the Gigabyte is entirely up to you. Other then that the feature sets are extremely well matched with both supporting dual gigabit LAN and offering 6 SATA2 ports, but the Gigabyte has the extra IDE ports which means you can save a little money and put off upgrading your IDE hard disks to SATA for a little longer.

Both boards sell for around £150, for which Gigabyte offer slightly more for your money in the form of a USB Bluetooth dongle and extra power regulation in from U-DPS which should definitely help if you fancy overclocking the new dual core CPUs. The lack of '3rd-Eye' inclusion, even though the motherboard has the pin-out to support it is disappointing and means ABIT offer nothing out of the norm in the box.

This doesn't mean ABIT isn't offering anything over the Gigabyte - the OTES system is worth its weight in gold when it comes to silent, efficient cooling, but Gigabyte also has the U-DPS.

The ABIT BIOS, while usually 100% straight forward is grazed by the fact you have to play about to get the memory divider you want, but compared to the ever annoying Ctrl+F1 trick you have to perform every time you go into the Gigabyte BIOS it's hardly worth mentioning.

For first time overclockers, Gigabytes C.I.A.2 auto overclocking system should be worth looking into and something that ABIT doesn't offer, although we always encourage the old-school DIY approach in order to gain a further understanding of your current and future systems, and to further understand the technical contents of our articles.

Overall, considering they are both around a very similar price we'd have to say you can't go wrong with either, but we'd recommend the Gigabyte GA-81955X Royal board because it offers a better value for money in bundled and motherboard extras over the ABIT AW8-MAX.