Overclocking and Stress Testing

Overclocking

Being added back into our reviews is the overclocking segment. As always, the users overclocking experience will vary greatly depending upon components used. We recommend strong caution when overclocking, because it can significantly degrade the life expectancy of the system. Memory voltage is at 2.0v and CPU vcore is left at default. Stability is tested by running one instance of Prime 95 on each CPU core while looping 3DMark for a twelve hour period.

Abit AB9 Pro 965P Motherboard Review - Motherboards 86

The max FSB I could achieve with the Abit was 274 MHz which is beyond the Asus which has always been a great overclocker for me. I am pleased to see the Abit AB9 Pro perform so well here. One area of concern though is the passively cooled chipset of the AB9 Pro. I used a case that featured very good airflow and the chipset still felt very warm to the touch. The temperature probe I attached to the chipset never went above 44C, but if used in a poorly ventilated case the chipset could get quite hot and affect your overclocking and stability.

Stress Test — Putting It All Together

Another test we added to the motherboard suite this time around was the stress test.  In this we take all the on-board components and make them all work together just to see if they play nicely. 

In our case here this meant running WMP10 on an HD video, having PCMark05 run some hard drive tests, running HDTach on the external USB hard drive, playing a large WAV file and running the network bandwidth test, all at the same time.  The tests were looped for an hour and we listened for sound ‘jumps’ or video stutters or anything similar.

Abit AB9 Pro 965P Motherboard Review - Motherboards 87

The Asus AB9 Pro Deluxe motherboard passed our stability tests without an issue running Ethernet, USB, graphics and hard drive tests all at the same time without slowdown and without crashing.

« PreviousNext »