Abit AA8 DuraMAX 925X Motherboard

Overclocking and System Setup

Overclocking

Overclocking was something we were really looking forward to on the AA8 DuraMAX based on what we had been hearing in the Abit Intel mobo forum community as well as with our success with past Abit boards in recent reviews.  For our overclocking tests, we took the Intel 560 processor out of the picture and instead used a 2.8 GHz Intel 520 processor, priced at around $200.  Using this processor we could push the FSB on the motherboard up as high as we can with less of a chance of hitting a speed block than we would on faster retail chips.

The results were pretty amazing, easily reaching a FSB of 264 MHz for a total core speed of just under 3.7 GHz.  Considering this was done with just stock cooling and minor voltage increases, taking the 2.8 GHz processor up 900 MHz is awesome.  Prior to testing with the AA8 DuraMAX, our Asus P5AD2 motherboard was able to overclock the FSB to 245 MHz, but this Abit board easily overshadows our success there. 

Simply put, the Abit boards offer the user all the tools they could possibly need to overclock their system and get every last MHz squeezed out of it. 

System Setup

Our system setup remains the same as the previous 775-pin based systems.

* The Asus P5AD2 motherboard runs at 202 MHz FSB by default, and will not run at spec 200 MHz.  This may cause a slight increase in performance in some cases.  See this page for more information.

The benchmarks used were:

• SiSoft Sandra 2003 Max3! and 2004 SP1
• AIDA32
• Cachemem
• Quake III: Arena
• Unreal Tournament 2003
• X2: The Threat
• 3D Mark 2001: SE v330
• PC Mark 2002
• Business Winstone 2004
• Content Creation Winstone 2004
• Sysmark 2004
• Webmark 2004
• LAME MP3 Encoding
• XMPEG / DivX Encoding
• WinRAR Compression
• SPECviewperf 7.1
• CineBench 2003
• ScienceMark 2.0 Beta