Analysis, Testing & Benchmarking

The system is loaded up and ready to rock under default system settings. The CPU voltage defaulted to 1.400 volts via system BIOS. With a 200MHz HTT on a 11 multiplier for a core speed of 2200MHz. Booting up the ABIT AN8 SLI was simple and easy, once we installed the CPU and related hardware the system went straight to POST and recognized all our peripherals instantly.

Now we are going to install this board into our test rig and set it up as a daily user and get some performance feedback. We will target the HDD performance, memory and graphics card performance using RightMark Memory Analyzer, Sandra, Everest and 3DMark05 for our testing API's. However before we do that, lets get familiar with the system BIOS.

If you are familiar with nForce4 platforms you will take note of similar differences from one BIOS to the next, while some will have proprietary settings like µGuru for instance, most will be the same, however with a few exceptions, there isn't much that separates the firmware on nForce4 platforms.

We have the typical Standard, Advanced, Integrated, Power Management options as we have seen on a number of boards. For out test we will install a 120GB Maxtor DiamondMax 9 series to get single channel results. You will also be able to set the time, error handling, enable & disable the floppy drives if your system is configured for floppy's. Pretty much the typical nForce4 BIOS.

If for any reason you want to personalize and utilize only certain aspects of the motherboard features you can prioritize settings and enable and disable features you do not need. On this page you will be able to assign boot device order giving priority to removable and hard disk configurations.

Under advanced chipset features, you will find the DRAM Configuration page. From here you will be able to control all the timings related to CL timings of the ram you are using. in our case we stuffed some Corsair XPERT in the ABIT AN8 SLI. Also you will be able to over clock the HyperTransport frequency and enhance system performance by enabling System BIOS cacheable.

Integrated peripherals will give you the options to enable or disable IDE/RAID configurations. If you plan on running a singled HDD you can simply install a single drive and be good to go. However if you plan to run a RAID array, you will need to navigate to this page and enable the RAID controller and assign the channels accordingly.

The power management page will allow you to adjust the way Windows controls your hardware at idle states. Control how your computer is awakened to powering down HDD's and Cool 'N Quiet, which is an automatic CPU fan controller that will spool up the speed of the CPU cooling fan as needed. In the Winter times we can see Cool 'N Quiet in action because the fan will actually stop spinning, giving you the impression there might be a fan failure. So keep that in mind, if your ambient temperatures are below the CPU cooling parameters, you might see the fan stop spinning all together. Zero CPU fan noise!