System setup and notes
Setup issues
During setting-up for testing this board we encountered a problem with 800MHz DDR RAM and USB devices. With our four sticks of Crucial DDR2-800 512MiB we found that the system would intermittently fail to POST. This fault was present with three BIOSes we tried, including version 1.2, dated 15/06/06.
Investigating the issue further, we found that reducing the memory clock from its auto-setting of DDR2-800, down to DDR2-667, fixed the problem, as did removing all attached USB devices from the system. Therefore we can conclude that some issue exists whereby the system won't always POST if RAM is running at DDR2-800 and USB devices are present. We confirmed this with another brand of DDR2-800 RAM - Mushkin modules. The problem also existed with a single stick in, obviously, single-channel mode.
Further trouble on the RAM front arose when trying to cold-boot with DDR2-800 CAS latency set below or equal to 4. We hope that abit can resolve these issues quickly, or it could be at risk of losing out to other boards which prove more stable.
Having spoken with abit about these issues, they have confirmed their existence, but narrowed the problem down to only specific RAM modules. They report that Corsair PC8500 EPP and OCZ PC8000 RAM do not exhibit this behaviour. This information came to light after our testing of the board.
Once again we couldn't get SLI to work with nVidia's 91.xx series of graphics drivers. However, this cannot be attributed to abit, as we've had the very same problem with MSI's nForce 570 SLI board. Thus, we used version 84.21 of the drivers for testing. The same nTune problems arose too, with the software not offering its full set of features. Still no fix for that, NVIDIA?
Run this board in a system with poor air cooling and the chipset will almost certainly overheat. If you're not in Windows at the time the system speaker will make a whiney sound that indicates a dying system. Interestingly when this happens, the BIOS only reports temperatures for system and PWMs as being in the high 30s and high 40s, respectively. Either the sensors aren't calibrated very well, or they're not positioned to give useful readouts. Regardless, have some sensible cooling if you're going to use this board.
System setup
| Abit KN9 SLI System | MSI K9N SLI Platinum System | Foxconn C51XEM2AA System | ATI Sturgeon System | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Processor | AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 (2.8GHz, 2MiB L2 cache, AM2) | |||
| Motherboard | Abit KN9 SLI | MSI K9N SLI Platinum - nForce 570 SLI | Foxconn C51XEM2AA - nForce 590 SLI | ATI Sturgeon Reference |
| Memory | 2GiB (4 x 512) Crucial Ballistix PC8000 | |||
| Memory timings | 4-3-3-8 2T | |||
| Graphics card(s) | NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX SLI | Radeon X1900 CROSSFIRE | ||
| Disk drive(s) | Seagate 160GB 7200.9 SATA 3Gbps | |||
| BIOS revision | 1.12 (18/05/06) | 1.12 (BETA) | 612W1P14 | 08.00.13 |
| Mainboard software | 9.34 | SATA(AHCI): 2.5.1540.25 IDE: 1.00.0000.3 CHIPSET: 5.10.1000.5 |
||
| Graphics driver | ForceWare 84.21 | ForceWare 91.27 | 8.243-060404a-033273E-ATI | |
| Operating System | Windows XP Pro SP2 32-bit | |||
CPU speed
Slightly varying clocks on motherboards lead to small differences in the resultant CPU speed. We saw our FX-62 clocked at 2813.1MHz under load on the abit KN9 SLI. Here are the figures we obtained from the other three boards in our tests:
MSI: 2800MHz
Foxconn: 2812.9MHz
ATI Sturgeon: 2812.6MHz
Testing software
We ran the Abit KN9 SLI through the usual barrage of tests:
- ScienceMark Memory Bandwidth
- ScienceMark Memory Latency
- Pifast calculation to 10M places
- HEXUS Cryptography
- KribiBench
- HEXUS WAV encoding
- HEXUS DivX encoding
- Cinebench 2003
For 3D performance it was the intrepid trio of HEXUS custom benchmarks:
- Far Cry v1.33
- Quake 4 v1.04
- Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05
All 3D tests were performed at the well-endowed resolution of 1920x1200.
We also ran HDTach version 3.0.1.0 on the system for read and burst speeds over the SATA interface. Further, we took its USB2.0 and IEEE connections for a spin via a 160GB Western Digital IDE drive in an external AKASA enclosure.
