Installing the motherboard was as easy as it should be and no major problems were encountered. Here is the motherboard installed in our test rig:

Once windows was installed, the time came to install the system drivers. The Abit driver CD has a nice feature called Q-Install, which will automatically install all the drivers on the CD with just one click on the Q-Install program.

Abit’s supplied monitoring program is a cut down version of the uGuru control seen on its higher end motherboards. It allows monitoring of the key voltages/temperatures/fan speeds, but doesn’t offer much in the way of tweaking, with just basic fan speed control (software only, so won’t engage unless the software is running) available.

Being used to the full uGuru software (and hardware chips to go with it) it’s a big step down in terms of what you can tweak, but the software does it’s job well of making sure that everything is running as it should.

Testrig

So with the motherboard installed, off I went to test the PC.

Theses scores may seem very low but when you factor in the performance bottleneck of the X700Pro, these are actually very good results (Looking at futuremark’s Orb database, these results would place 3rd for PCMark05 and 19th for 3DMark06 (with this card), and that is with everything at stock!)

The memory scores for the RAM are much better and are about on par for what you should expect from RAM of this type (800Mhz @ 5-5-5-15).

The scores for the CPU benchmarks are slightly higher than SiSoftware Sandra’s reference E6600 scores (21685 and 15090 respectively, if you were wondering) which is also a good point for this board. So now that we have seen that the board is slightly above average in stock performance, let’s see how it gets on with overclocking.

Next Page – Overclocking