X-bit labs

abit IP35 Pro Mainboard Review (page 8)

Category: Mainboards

by Doors4ever

[ 07/19/2007 | 08:57 AM ]

Overclocking and Performance Tests

This is usually a pretty long chapter of every mainboard review on our site. This is where we share all the frustrations and problems we face during our overclocking experiments, describe the search for optimal voltage settings, numerous reboots and CMOS clearing… But this time, you won’t find any of that here: it’s been long since I came across a mainboard that would overclock CPUs that easily.

Our tests were performed on the following testbed:

• abit IP35 Pro v 1.00 mainboard, BIOS 1.0;
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 CPU (1.86GHz, FSB 266MHz, Conroe-2M, rev. B2);
• 2 x 1024MB Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-9136C5D;
• NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB graphics card;
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.10, ST3320620AS HDD, 7200rpm, 16MB, SATA 320GB;
• Zalman CNPS9700 LED CPU cooler;
• OCZ GameXStream GXS700 PSU (700W).

Since I already knew what the Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 CPU is capable of, I raised its voltage to 1.45V and set the FSB to 490MHz right away. After that I increased the memory voltage to 2.2V and the system booted without any problems. System couldn’t pass the tests, but it didn’t discourage me: the stability issue was fully resolved by raising the North Bridge voltage from the default 1.25V to 1.33V.

Later on I reduced the processor Vcore a little bit, to 1.435V, because it turned out that abit IP35 Pro doesn’t lower it as much as ASUS mainboards do. And that was it.

As for the performance, it was pretty similar to the performance of MSI P35 Platinum mainboard. No wonder, since the chipsets are the same. The only difference is that we managed to achieve these results fast and easy.

The performance is almost the same, abit IP35 Pro is a little bit faster because we managed to reduce the memory timings unlike the settings on MSI mainboard.

However, Fritz Chess Benchmark seems to have a completely different opinion about it: it states that MSI mainboard is still faster.

Speaking of the memory working frequency, I can state that in synchronous mode we didn’t get beyond 980MHz because of the limitations imposed by our test CPU. In asynchronous mode our memory subsystem ran at about 1100MHz frequency, a little higher or lower, depending on the selected divider.