by Doors4ever
02/13/2008 | 09:10 AM
abit mainboards do not need a special introduction. In fact, abit is the first contemporary overclocker brand. The company has gone a long way. They started off with the revolutionary in its principles but primitive in its looks SoftMenu that allowed jumper-free adjustment of different system settings and have now arrived to remarkable form of this technology represented by today’s abit μGuru. This was a thorny path. Computer enthusiasts know about all the difficulties the company had to face over the past few years. However, looks like the crisis is finally gone, and an extremely successful IP35 mainboard series released last year is a clear indication of that.
<%BANNER[article]%>abit IP35 Pro is one of the best mainboards on Intel P35 Express chipset of the past year 2007. It not only got our prestigious Editor’s Choice, but also won numerous awards from other publications, and what is even more important got recognized by numerous users all over the world.
That is why we were extremely excited about the new abit mainboards and finally our patience was rewarded to the utmost. Our today’s article will be devoted to the new abit IX38 QuadGT mainboard based on Intel X38 Express chipset and its performance against the predecessors and competitors.
abit IX38 QuadGT Speedster mainboard is shipped in a vertical box with a carry handle for your convenience. The top slip-on box features racing design theme, which is also backed up by the mainboard model name. The box is decorated with photographs and tells you briefly about the mainboard features and specifics of the bundled software.
The internal box made of thick carton protects the mainboard from transportation damages. There is also a two-sectional box with accessories right beneath it. There are not too many accessories bundled with the board. The package contains:
Even abit IP35 Pro boasted more accessories, however, we have decided not to impose any penalties for that long time ago already. So, just take note that there are not too many goodies coming with the board.
Well, we have expected to see something new, and we got it: abit IX38 QuadGT mainboard looks very unusual because of the unique fanless cooling system called Silent OTES and designed using heatpipe technology.
Everything starts quite traditionally, with a small heatsink on top of the chipset South Bridge. Note that this is a heatsink, and not just a heat-spreader with a few plates pressing a heatpipe against the chip cover. The rib array is not too tall, so that it doesn’t hinder installation of graphics cards with long PCBs.
The heatpipe leads from the South Bridge heatsink to the top of the North Bridge heatsink. The latter is designed with a copper plate in the base and an array of thin wave-shaped plates.
Intel X38 Express chipset dissipates more heat than the previous Intel solutions that is why the heatsink has two threaded holes at the bottom for a reason. They serve to fasten an additional 40mm fan (not included with the board), which will be really helpful at all times.
There is a second heatpipe originating from the base of the chipset North Bridge heatsink. However, it doesn’t lead to the heatsink on top of MOSFET transistors, as we would have expected, but in a totally opposite direction, to a smaller additional heatsink between the processor socket and memory DIMM slots.
This heatsink hangs in mid air, doesn’t touch anything, but we doubt that it is an efficient solution. It will definitely be in the way when you try to install large coolers or fans that usually attach to tower coolers (such as Scythe Ninja, for instance) particularly on that side. We do understand that hot chipset needs an additional heatsink for better cooling, but why such an unusual implementation? It could be the digital processor voltage regulator circuitry that determined this design choice.
According to the manufacturer, five-phase processor voltage regulator features the whole bunch of advantages. It boasts longer component life span compared with the traditional solutions, higher setting precision, increased stability… Only one statement is really hard to agree to: that this solution boasts lower heat dissipation. On the contrary, the digital processor voltage regulators we have come across before have always heated up a lot. And the circuitry on abit IX38 QuadGT is no exception. Although the L-shaped heatsink features larger heat dissipating area, it still heats up significantly.
abit IX38 QuadGT mainboard allows controlling the temperatures of each of the five phases, and we performed a small experiment to check it out. First of all, we set the Zalman CNPS9700 LED cooler fan at its maximum rotation speed, because at lower RPM the PWM heatsink would heat up too much. By the way, unlike contemporary ASUS mainboards as well as solutions from some other manufacturers, abit IX38 QuadGT mainboard copes excellently with fan rotation speed management despite a three-pin fan connector. After that we overclocked the quad-core Kentsfield based processor to 3.4GHz and loaded it to the full extent using Prime95 utility. Four minutes have hardly passed when PWM temperature exceeded 100ºC.
We performed this test in an open testbed with the fan rotating at its maximum speed of 2500RPM, which is far from the comfortable noise level. Of course, no doubt we will be able to hit the same barrier much faster inside a closed system case with the lower fan rotation speed. Once you reach 110ºC you will get a safety warning, and what should you do after that? Power the system off?
The heatsink has a few holes in its upper part, where you can fasten an additional 40mm fan with special brackets. The only problem is that these brackets have mysteriously disappeared from the mainboard’s accessories bundle. Besides, the small fan is highly unlikely to significantly improve the temperature, when the large processor fan directed right at the heatsink failed.
Now we understand that if this super-hot PWM heatsink was connected with the chipset North Bridge heatsink via a heatpipe, it would only warm it up more instead of cooling it down. That is why they had to place an additional heatsink in a non-traditional and not the most convenient spot: between the processor socket and the memory DIMM slots. Of course, dual-core processor heats up considerably less than a quad-core one, but what shall the owners of Core 2 Quad on Kentsfield core do? Overall, the design and cooling efficiency of this solution are pretty doubtful and may somewhat spoil your impression about abit IX38 QuadGT, however other than that, we cannot point out any other serious issues or concerns regarding the mainboard design.
The expansion slots are located in the lower part of the PCB. There is a PCI Express x1 slot, two blue PCI Express x16 slots supporting PCI 2.0 standard and one more black slot between them that operates at PCI Express x4 speed. There are also two PCI slots available.
We could probably express our discontent about the low location of the FDD connector, however, it is not a serious issue, as floppy disks have practically got out of business by now. However, among the advantages we should certainly point out that IDE and Serial ATA connectors are positioned horizontally, there is abit’s traditional POST code indicator, the front panel connectors are all color-coded. Of course, the Power On and Reset buttons are highlighted, which is also a very convenient feature. The integrated network is implemented via Realtek RTL8110 controller. Besides, there is also an additional IEEE1394 controller from Texas Instruments.
The mainboard rear panel carries PS/2 connectors for keyboard and mouse, Clear CMOS button, S/PDIF In and Out, two eSATA connectors (JMicron JMB363 chip), six audio-jacks (Realtek ALC888 codec), four USB ports, one IEEE1394 port and one RJ45 connector. Four USB ports may be not enough for a contemporary PC, so it is really a pity that there is no bracket with additional USB and IEEE1394 ports in the accessories bundle, like the one abit IP35 Pro had.
To sum up everything we have just discussed we would like to offer you a table with a complete list of abit IX38 QuadGT technical specifications and features:
The abit IX38 QuadGT mainboard sample we received for our tests featured a BIOS version 1.1 dating back to October 2007. abit doesn’t have a convenient built-in utility for easy BIOS reflashing, like the solutions from ASUS or Gigabyte. We didn’t find any appropriate utilities on their web-site as well as on the bundled CD disk that is why we had to resort to the good old-fashioned way of reflashing the newest BIOS version 1.2 from the floppy disk. However, later on we noticed that during abit μGuru installation you also get BlackBox and Flash Menu utilities, so don’t stress if you have no FDD.
abit IX38 QuadGT mainboard BIOS is based on a highly functional Phoenix-Award micro-code that we know very well from the previous abit mainboards.
By pressing F6 you can save the current settings in the memory. You can save the total of five profiles and name each one of them. By pressing F7 you can load the chosen profile instead of changing all the BIOS parameters one by one manually.
Most overclocking related features are gathered in μGuru Utility section. The first page you get to is called OC Guru:
By default all CPU and memory related parameters are set automatically, but we can select User Define mode I order to change the FSB frequency in the interval from 133MHz to 750MHz with 1MHz increment or change the processor clock frequency multiplier. In this case the Estimated New CPU Clock string will report the resulting CPU frequency. PCI Express Clock parameter allows changing the PCI-E bus frequency from 100MHz to 200MHz with 1MHz increment. The desired memory frequency can be selected from the drop down list of CPU:DRAM dividers. The resulting memory clock that depends on the divider and the current FSB frequency will be displayed in brackets.
To adjust voltages we have to go to the Voltages Control page:
It is not very convenient that the processor Vcore has to be set using two different parameters. It could result from the use of a digital processor voltage regulator. CPU Core Voltage VID can be adjusted from 0.8V to 1.6V with 0.0125V increment. As for the CPU Core Voltage Offset parameter, on many other mainboards it allows increasing the processor Vcore by a specified value. However, on abit IX38 QuadGT you get access to a long list of voltages up to 0.57V with 0.01V increment. Unlike some other mainboard makers, abit takes good care of their users so you will not have to add the values manually: the resulting voltage will be displayed in Target CPU Core Voltage field.
Other voltages that can be adjusted on abit IX38 QuadGT mainboard are also quite numerous and include the following parameters and supported intervals:
Once we adjusted frequencies and voltages we can immediately check if the selected values are operational since abit IX38 QuadGT mainboard can overclock without leaving the BIOS Setup. By pressing F8 we enable OC On The Fly. The mainboard uses all new BIOS settings such as voltages and frequencies, and if it didn’t hang during this quick check-up, then it may be a good idea to reboot with these settings. This saves a lot of time on numerous failed restarts, simplifies and speeds up the search for optimal BIOS settings.
μGuru Utility section includes two sub-sections. We have already talked about OC Guru features, now it is high time we checked out remarkable monitoring functions offered by ABIT EQ section.
Besides, CPU temperature, system temperature and power consumption, abit has every right to be proud of the opportunity to monitor the temperature of each of the five phases in the processor voltage regulator.
There is only one more mainboard and only from abit that can compare to abit IX38 QuadGT in terms of the number of monitored voltages:
The board can monitor rotation speed of all six fans that can be connected to it.
The users of other manufacturers’ mainboards cannot even simply monitor the rotation speeds of so many fans. abit IX38 QuadGT, however, can even adjust the rotation speed of each fan from the list.
The CPU fan rotation speed is set in percents from the maximum speed. As for the other fans, the rotation speed is set in the interval from minimum to maximum possible speed depending on the set temperature.
μGuru Utility section is extremely rich and covers all the possible settings except the memory timings that can be adjusted in Advanced Chipset Features page:
Other BIOS features of abit IX38 QuadGT mainboard are quite traditional. I would only like to specifically stress that they have finally enabled default USB keyboard support. It is a very small thing, but a pretty important one, considering how many USB keyboards are being used these days.
For our overclocking and performance tests we assembled an open testbed with the following hardware components:
Overclocking processors on abit IX38 QuadGT mainboard is extremely easy. Knowing what our test Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 CPU (2.66GHz, 266MHz FSB, 8MB, Kentsfield rev. B3) is capable of, we only had to set the corresponding parameters in the BIOS and in no time we hit its maximum frequency of 3.4GHz. The Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 processor (1.86GHz, 266MHz FSB, 2MB, Conroe-2M rev. B2) also overclocked to its maximum of 490MHz FSB without any problems. Thanks to rich and very conveniently implemented features of the abit IX38 QuadGT mainboard, it will be extremely easy to find the most optimal parameters for any other processor.
However, we still cannot claim that this is an ideal situation. abit IX38 QuadGT inherited not only the advantages of its predecessors, but also a few drawbacks. For example, just like abit IP35 Pro, the new abit IX38 QuadGT doesn’t allow to change the boot-up device during system start. If you need to boot from a USB flash drive or a CD disk all of a sudden, you will have to go into mainboard BIOS first and change the boot-up devices order and once the boot-up is successful, you will have to get back in there and change it again. A lot of other mainboard available today provide access to boot-up menu where you can immediately select the boot-up device.
Moreover, we have suddenly found out that if the processor voltage has been increased during overclocking, abit IX38 QuadGT mainboard, just like ASUS boards, cannot reduce the CPU Vcore if the workload gets low, although abit IP35 Pro had no problems with power-saving technologies. I hope that they can fix this issue. Digital processor voltage regulator implies additional flexibility and finer tuning for the system processor. So, we dare assume that they didn’t just give up the ability to reduce processor voltage in idle mode, and when they get more comfortable with this fairly new voltage regulator technology, it will be brought back.
Secondly, we were a little concerned about the memory timings abit IX38 QuadGT set during Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 overclocking to 490MHz FSB:
In fact, we have no problem with the timings, but the Performance Level is extremely high in this case. The lower is the Performance Level, the higher is the mainboard performance. I have never seen Performance Level above 9 on abit IP35 Pro mainboard. This time, however, it is automatically set to 10 and cannot be changed manually, like on ASUS mainboards, for instance.
The next problem occurred when we overclocked Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 processor using 9x clock multiplier in order to replicate overclocking of the popular Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600. The FSB frequency in this case was raised to 378MHz, which allowed us to push the CPU to 3.4GHz speed. If you remember from our previous article, we had to replace abit IP35 Pro mainboard with ASUS Blitz Formula on the same Intel P35 Express chipset in order to make sure that the performance was competitive with that of ASUS Maximus Extreme with DDR3 SDRAM running at 1.5GHz. abit IP35 Pro allowed setting the memory frequency to 945MHz, however, it was not enough, while 1134MHz was way too high. ASUS Blitz Formula is more flexible with the memory settings thanks to an intermediate divider that allowed setting the memory frequency to 1008MHz. Besides, its Ai Transaction Booster parameter allows setting manually the most optimal Performance Level for the given conditions. In case of abit IX38 QuadGT mainboard, everything happened exactly the same way. The mainboard works with the memory exactly the same way and Performance Level cannot be changed, just like on abit IP35 Pro.
In our article about Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-9136C5D memory modules we proved that they can work at 960MHz with 4-4-4-12-2T timings. You may believe that this guarantees the memory can work at 945MHz with these timings settings, however, in reality we failed to get it to run stably at this speed. This memory used to be tested on an Nvidia nForce 680i SLI based reference mainboard, and today we are using an Intel chipset. I doubt anyone will argue that Nvidia chipsets are more flexible than Intel ones when it comes to working with the memory subsystem. So, in the end, we had to keep the timings at their default values.
No wonder that abit IX38 QuadGT mainboard failed to withstand the aggression of ASUS Blitz Formula, where the same DDR2 SDRAM worked at higher speeds with the same timings, or ASUS Maximus Extreme that used even more high-frequency DDR3 memory. However, some of the tests from PCMark Vantage suite have a different opinion about it. Maybe we should replace this complex system performance test with a few separate but more adequate benchmarks in the future.
You shouldn’t pay too much attention to performance comparison between the different boards. Any good mainboard should be functional, convenient to work with, and the performance should better rest on the shoulders of the system processor and graphics card. However, this time we see that our hero lost to its competitors because of insufficient flexibility of abit IX38 QuadGT when working with the memory subsystem.
We were expecting something new and we got it. Unfortunately, new doesn’t always mean “better”. abit IX38 QuadGT mainboard is based on a new Intel X38 Express chipset, but its advantages are not that evident. They may matter more in the future, but higher price and higher heat dissipation do matter now already. We got a new cooling system, but its design is questionable and its cooling efficiency may be insufficient in some cases. Power-saving technologies do not work during overclocking any more, the bundle got a little more modest, and other than that everything remained the same.
Speaking of abit IX38 QuadGT mainboard we have to stress, though, that despite a few things we wish had been better, it is an excellent product. It boasts remarkable features and functionality, overclocks processors quickly and easily. It is a good board, which will hopefully become better with the time.