Overclocking
We've had a lot of success overclocking ABIT motherboards in the past, and despite having issues with the K8T800 and overclocking on other motherboards, I wasn't exactly sure what to expect with the KV8-MAX3. Also, we do not yet have any "extreme" cooling to use with the A64, so we had to resort to an AVC air cooler (which happens to have a copper core). With that in mind, I tried using the OCGuru first, and we managed a max OC of 222MHz until we locked up. On reboot, the OS did load, but it was a matter of minutes before the OS rebooted on its own. Using the OCGuru, we ran several trials, and the end result was a stable 209MHz, which isn't anything to write home about.
We set the FSB back to 200MHz, and rebooted to use the trusty SoftMenu. The system successfully POSTed at 229MHz, but it kept hanging at the loading Windows screen. We lowered the FSB to 226, and it took about 45 seconds to get into the OS. I was certain there were no driver conflicts, as this was a bare disk image, and we didn't have these problems with the OCGuru. At 224MHz, everything loaded up fine, but as soon as I launched my first application, our mouse cursor just displayed an hour glass, forcing us to manually reboot. I adjusted the the LDT Bus to 400MHz, set our Kingston HyperX to 3-4-4-8 and DDR333, and maxed out our voltages, but the system stability did not change much. In the end, we settled on a 214MHz OC before all was well, using the settings mentioned previously.
In order to run at a DDR400, and LDT at 800, the board's maximum OC was 209Mhz (as it was using OCGuru). This mirrors the results we've had with past K8T800's, and it looks like even ABIT's engineers couldn't squeeze more out of the VIA chipset.
209FSB
Test Setup
ABIT KV8-MAX3: Athlon 64 3200+ (10x200: 2GHz), 2 x 512MB Kingston HyperX PC4000 (2.5-3-3-6), AIW Radeon 9600 Pro, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1, VIA Hyperion 4in1 drivers 4.51, ATI Catalyst 4.2.
MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R: Athlon 64 3200+ (10x200: 2GHz), 2 x 512MB Kingston HyperX PC4000 (2.5-3-3-6), AIW Radeon 9600 Pro, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1, VIA Hyperion 4in1 drivers 4.51, ATI Catalyst 4.2.
ASUS K8V Deluxe: Athlon 64 3200+ (10x200: 2GHz), 2 x 512MB Kingston HyperX PC4000 (2.5-3-3-6), AIW Radeon 9600 Pro, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1, VIA Hyperion 4in1 drivers 4.51, ATI Catalyst 4.2.
Test software will be:
SiSoft Sandra 2004; Business and Content Creation Winstone 2004; PiFast 4.3; CDex Wav to MP3; TMPGEnc (AVI to MPEG-2 encoding); Quake 3: Arena; Return to Castle Wolfenstein; Call of Duty; Audio Bench; DU Meter; HD Tach
All our benchmarks were run on a 32-bit version of Windows XP. The official release of 64-bit Windows isn't due for a few months, and according to AMD, we may get a significant performance boost in a true 64-bit environment. In anycase, the Athlon 64 (A64) runs 32-bit code natively with no emulation.
SiSoft Sandra 2004
Although a synthetic benchmark, it's a popular one, freely available if you wish to make comparison benchmarks. We will be testing the CPU, MMX, and memory speeds, using the 32-bit 2004 version.
CPU Arithmetic Benchmark
CPU Multimedia Benchmark
Memory Benchmark
In al three SiSoft Sandra tests, we see that the ABIT board appears to be the fastest between the three, and by a significant margin in each of the tests. Will this trend continue as we move along in the review?
ZD Business Winstone 2004
The ZD Winstone suite is a script that runs a series of actions and calculates a final score that measures a PC's overall performance.
ZD Content Creation 2004
Earlier versions of this benchmark had some issues running on the KV8-MAX3, but we didn't have any problems with the 2004 version.
We get a bit of a flip-flop here as the KV8 takes the Business Winstone tests, but falls a little short in Content Creation. Still a good showing on ABIT's part.
PiFast
A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is version 4.2, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory. Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.
Lower Times are Better
In the first of our series of real-world tests, the KV8-MAX3 completely dominates the PiFast tests. ABIT's board is close to four seconds faster than the other two here.
