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ABIT AV8 3rd Eye

AMD Athlon 64 socket 939 motherboard
Chipset VIA K8T800 Pro and VIA 8237
AGP / PCI

Performance

Now, on to the performance evaluation. Like we said before, the AV8 is a good board. Even with its minor gripes, features such as the µGURU Clock or the multitudes of ports and connectors more than make up for it. During testing, we encounter no problems what so ever with this board. The installation process is smooth, even installing directly to S-ATA drives and arrays are easy since ABIT bundled the necessary driver disk. Everything just works the way that it should.

One note on performance: the AV8 defaults to a FSB of 204 MHz by default. Choosing 200 MHz doesn't make much difference (less than 2 FPS or lower), so we're using the default FSB set by the board (204 MHz). This does makes the processor runs a fraction faster (our socket 939 Athlon 64 3000+ runs at 1838 MHz with the AV8 3rd Eye).

Before looking at the test results, we encourage you to read our 'How We Evaluate' article so you understand how we conduct our test and benchmarks. More importantly, you will also see how each benchmarks react with our test setup. We only put the average, minimum and maximum fps in this evaluation to keep it brief.

Our test setup
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 'Newcastle' socket 939
2 x 256 MB Kingston KVR 3-3-3 PC3200 DDR-SDRAM
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro AGP 8x
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GBs Serial ATA 8 MB buffer
ASUS E-616 DVD-ROM
450 watts ATX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
ATI Catalyst 5.4 reference driver
VIA Hyperion 4-in-1 4.56 reference driver
Realtek ALC 658 Driver WDM 5.630 (motherboard supplied driver)
DirectX 9.0c
all respected games used for benchmarks have been updated to their latest, final builds.

Why we've chosen this setup:

AGP motherboards and graphics cards are on the way out, replaced by their respective PCI Express variants. Even gamers and users using existing AGP boards will eventually upgrade to PCI Express motherboards. For the most part, the main reason they haven't is because of the graphics card. There are faster AGP graphics card than the Radeon 9700 Pro such as the GeForce 6800 and Radeon X800 series, or even the mainstream parts such as GeForce 6600 and Radeon X700 series. But ask yourselves this question: Why buy the AGP variants now, since we're all eventually going to upgrade to PCI Express? Gamers still using AGP cards will either buy mainstream cards (6600 and X700 series) or older high end cards (5900 and 9700/9800 series). Why the Radeon 9700 Pro? Well, this old card is still pretty powerful and it can be bought for around US $ 125, compared to the average US $ 200 for GeForce 6600 GTs. Remember, that we're targeting mainstream users here and they don't want to spend more money than they have to on a setup that's going to be obsolete within a year. That's why we've chosen this setup, since we feel it reflects the market for this product more accurately. Of course, we will be using a different setup for testing high end cards and PCI Express motherboards.

The results:

Don't let the minimum fps fool you: that minimum 6 fps happens on mid-level loads. Gameplay wise, we rarely go down beyond 30 fps and that happens mostly in the last parts of the benchmarks. So overall, we get very solid average fps of 93.43 fps and minimum 30 fps in Dungeon Siege. Clearly the AV8 gives fluid gameplay experience you can expect from the Athlon 64 3000+.


With Splinter Cell, we do get a lower minimum 24.6 fps and an average fps of 49.25 fps, similar to what we expect from this kind of setup. Still playable and doesn't interfere with gameplay. The AV8 has a slight advantage in the lightest part of the demo, but that difference is hardly noticeable in gameplay.


Removing the 80 fps cap in Call of Duty nets us an average fps of 120 fps, more or less. Again, the minimum 18 fps happens at the very beginning of the benchmark. In gameplay, we get minimum frame rates of 45 fps, Call of Duty is very fluid on this system. So, even if you don't execute the command 'com_maxfps 0' in the console, you still get a very solid 80 fps in average on the AV8 3rd Eye.

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