Abit KN9 SLI

Testing Methods:

With the exception of SiSoft Sandra, all of our benchmarks have been engineered to give you numbers that you are likely to find useful when actually using the products we have evaluated in the real world.

We are also focusing a lot more of our time on evaluating the stability of the motherboards (and platforms) using a stress test designed to highlight any of the potential weaknesses that the product may have. That involves a gradually increasing amount of stress starting with Prime95 and expanding to IOMeter and an endless loop of Far Cry loop if all is well. This is to ensure that all parts of the system are stressed simultaneously over a period of time.

We believe that the consumer is never likely to subject their platform to this level of stress and we are not expecting every product to complete an entire extended stress test. However, most poorly engineered products fail within the first couple of hours, or even minutes, allowing us to make a conscious decision on whether a motherboard (or platform) is worth your money, regardless of how well it performs in our benchmarks.

Test Setup:

AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 (operating at 2800MHz - 14x200); 2 x 1GB Corsair XMS2-6400C3 (running at DDR2-800 in dual channel with 3.0-4-3-9-1T timings - 5.0-4-3-9-2T for the KA3 MVP); BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC video card (operating at 670/1640MHz); Seagate 7200.9 200GB 7,200RPM SATA 3Gbps hard disk drive; OCZ GameXStream 700W power supply unit; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA Forceware 91.31 WHQL.

Motherboards:

• Abit KN9 SLI (nForce 570 SLI);
  
• MSI K9N SLI Platinum (nForce 570 SLI);
  
• ECS KA3 MVP (CrossFire Xpress 3200);
  
• ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe WiFi Edition (nForce 590 SLI);
  
• Foxconn C51XEM2AA (nForce 590 SLI);
  
• Intel D975XBX (975X)

CrossFire & SLI Testing:

Along with the single card testing, we ran our full suite of benchmarks on the four boards tested with multi-GPU enabled. This meant running Radeon X1900 CrossFire in CrossFire Xpress 3200 motherboards, and BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC SLI in nForce 500-series motherboards. The CrossFire Xpress 3200 motherboards were tested with Catalyst 6.6 WHQL, while the nForce 590 SLI and nForce 570 SLI boards were tested with 91.31 WHQL and 91.33 beta respectively. The nForce platform driver version was 9.16 for nForce 570 SLI and 9.35 for nForce 590 SLI.

Using the latest 91.31 drivers caused some rather terminal problems when enabling SLI mode on the MSI K9N SLI Platinum motherboard. After enabling SLI mode with the 91.31 WHQL drivers, the computer would lock up with either a black screen or unreadable desktop corruption. We had better luck with the Forceware 91.33 beta drivers that are available from nZone. These drivers didn't suffer from the same problems with the MSI K9N SLI Platinum and other nForce 570 SLI motherboards we have.