AMD 770X Motherboard Duel

Abit AX78 and Sapphire AM2RX780 Testing Methods:

With the exception of SiSoft Sandra, HD Tach and Lavalys Everest, 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 torture test on all cores and expanding to a looping 3DMark06. 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:

Motherboards:

• Sapphire AM2RX780 (AMD 770, DDR2, 60PG BIOS)
  
• Abit AX78 (AMD 770, DDR2, 1.2 BIOS)

Common Components:

• AMD Phenom X3 8750 (65nm, 12x200MHz, 2.4GHz)
  
• 2GB OCZ OCZ FlexXLC PC-9200 memory DDR2 at 1066MHz at 5-5-5-15 2T
  
• Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT
  
• Two AMD ATI Radeon HD 3850 256MB in CrossFire
  
• Corsair VX550W PSU
  
• Seagate 7200.9 Barracuda 250Gb HDD
  
• Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit SP1
  
• Nvidia Forceware 175.19 WHQL
  
• ATI Catalyst 8.6 WHQL