Test Bed Specs

Overclocking on this board was a treat and I was able to get the CPU and FSB up from 3.0/200 to 3.7/250 FSB via the software straight away. This was easy as the software makes changing the voltages and the FSB a piece of p**s er cake. Here before I bench the board on a few simple tests here is some info on the clocks achieved on a lowly P4 3.0 on this board.

This was the default clock I had set up in the bios, with the uGuru soft I am able to push the system via windows, if I go to far the system will simply hang, then reboot at the default setting. Which means no opening up the case to reset that bios jumper.

I could actually hit 260 as well np (don’t forget the P4 530 is multiplier locked in all motherboards) but the best performance was found and some very impressive results were found.

Running at 260 it was stable but did not give the best performance results.

As you can see I had no problem hitting the 1000mhz mark on the ram thanks to the PC8000 ddr2 from Kingston, this stopped there being a limit on the overclock of the CPU.

Bellow are a few results from benches that I ran

Everest

As you can see from the screen shot above, the AW8-D (result in bold)  and the AW8 max have both enabled me to get this CPU to return higher benches than the standard P4EE on memory tests and CPU.

PCmark

Sisoft

As you can see from the tests the board had no problems reaching the 250/260 mark and then I believe that was only because of a locked multiplier. I am happy that abit have not ruined the AW8 name (one board that set the standard in my eyes) and the newest version based on the 975x chipset the AW8-D does not disappoint. Yes there is no core 2 (conroe) support, but for those looking to upgrade there existing motherboard I would give this a look.

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