First Look: Abit AW9D-MAX

Test Setup:

Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (operating at 2.93GHz - 11x266); 2x 1GB Corsair XMS2-6400C3 (running at DDR2-800 in dual channel with 3-3-3-9 timings); BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC video card (operating at 670/1640MHz); Seagate 7200.9 200GB 7200RPM 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 AW9D-MAX (Intel 975X);
  
• Intel D975XBX (Intel 975X)

Due to the amount of time we had with the board, and the fact that it is a pre-production sample, we didn't complete a full review of the AW9D-MAX. Instead, we are providing a taster of things to come.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0

For our Photoshop Elements test, we used a selection of 400 3MP photographs taken in a variety of surroundings using the batch file processing function in the Elements Editor. We performed all of the auto fixes, including Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, Auto Colour and Sharpen before resizing the image to 640x480 and saving as a high quality JPEG.

The AW9D-MAX is slightly slower than Intel's reference D975XBX BadAxe board in our Photoshop test. There are a lot of disk I/O's during this test, so it could be that the BadAxe's I/O performance is a little better.

File Compression & Encryption:

Our file compression and decompression tests were split into two halves to cover a broad spectrum of performance. The first test we ran was to compress and encrypt the MPEG-2 source file from our video encoding test with the highest quality compression ratio. Secondly, we compressed and encrypted the folder of 400 photographs used in our Photoshop Elements test with the same compression settings.

Abit appears to have set the board up with more aggressive memory timings - we have found that memory timings really help to improve performance in our file compression tests.

Xvid Encoding:

We tested video encoding performance using VirtualDub-MPEG version 1.6.15 and a multithreaded version of the Xvid codec, along with the LAME MT MP3 encoder for encoding audio. We did a two-pass encode of a 15-minute 276MB digital TV recording with a target file size of 100MB.

Again, memory performance plays a part in Xvid Encoding, as the AW9D-MAX is nine seconds faster than the reference D975XBX mobo.