Benchmarks: 3D performance and storage
3D Performance
Chances are you'd be playing a few games on this board if you had it, so let's see if it responds to this demand well. Remember, folks, that the tests carried out here have used dual cards. GeForce 7900 GTX 512MiB SLI for NVIDIA and a Radeon X1900 CrossFire setup for, you've guessed it, ATI.
Running the same drivers as the MSI K9N SLI, the abit KN9 SLI shows an almost identical result for our Far Cry 1.33 benchmark. We're looking forward to a fix coming so that we can get SLI benchmarks running on nForce 570 SLI boards with the series 90 drivers.
In Quake 4 the story is slightly different, with the abit board pushing its way to the front of the queue, and not for the first time in our barrage of tests, either.
As with Far Cry, in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, the abit board performs almost the same as its fellow nForce 570 SLI-based MSI board.
Overall, then, for 3D performance, the Abit KN9 SLI will quite happily take two 7900GTXs and do as good a job with them as pretty much any other board. We'd really like it if the 90 series drivers worked on nForce 570 SLI, though.
Storage
Can the SATA channels on Abit's board keep to the pace?
But of course they can. Indeed, exactly the same performance as the other two boards with nForce 500-series chipsets. We wonder where ATI get that extra 0.2MiB/s from?
Uncannily, it's neck and neck in the burst rate stakes, between the nForce 570 SLI boards.
Of course, internal storage performance isn't the only thing to be concerned about. With external enclosures all the rage for backup and portability purposes, the USB implementation needs to be up to scratch. Here's what we found when we tested it:
This board didn't seem so hot on the USB2.0 transfer rate, although it doesn't under perform so dramatically that we're hugely concerned. However, Perhaps this and our DDR2-800/USB POST problem are related?
Using the FireWire 400 interface on the board, however, we get 38.7 MiB/s, which is much better, the quickest of our quartet, in fact. Foxconn's board fares poorly, but we believe it's a possibly a BIOS problem present when we tested the board. At the time of writing, we haven't had opportunity to re-test with an updated BIOS.
SATA storage appears fine, then, as does FireWire, although USB seems a little slow, possibly hounded by the DDR/USB issue we came across.
