Reviews
T
his month we look at Abit’s
AA8 DuraMax motherboard and
Gigabyte’s GA-8I915P Duo (Pro)-A.
One asks you to take a giant leap off a cliff
into the new world of PCI Express and
DDR2, while the other firmly straddles the
old and new worlds.
—GORDON MAH UNGAbit AA8 DuraMax
Outfitted with Intel’s new 925X chipset,
Abit’s AA8 DuraMax mobo embraces PCI
Express and DDR2 with wide-open arms.
The board features a single x16 PCI-E
slot for graphics, and no fewer than three
x1 slots for PCI-E add-in boards. The only
problem, of course, is that PCI Express
cards are impossible to find. This leaves the
mobo with room for just two PCI cards. If
you have a TV tuner, SCSI card, and sound-
card, you’re going to have to vote one off
the DuraMax island.
PCI slots aren’t the only thing Abit
has eschewed on the DuraMax. While the
board gives you four SATA ports, you get
just a single parallel ATA connector. This
means that if you have two optical drives
and a parallel ATA hard drive, another one
of your precious components will have to
leave the tribe.On the positive side, this mobo includes
four USB ports, FireWire A, Gigabit
Ethernet, and two optical ports. Audio
is powered by a RealTek ALC880, which
supports 8-channel 24-bit/96kHz audio.
Abit also uses expensive and more reliable
Japanese-made Rubycon capacitors in the
AA8 DuraMax, which is wise considering
Abit was one of several vendors plagued by
bad capacitors a few years ago.
Our main problem with the AA8
DuraMax isn’t the forward thinking—it’s
the lackluster performance. For our tests,
we used a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 in LGA775,
a GeForce 6800 Ultra card, and 300GB
Maxtor SATA drive, and were disappointed
with the results. Astonishingly, Gigabyte’s
GA-8I915P Duo (Pro)-A mobo, with its
supposedly slower 915P chipset (reviewed
below), ran just as fast, if not faster, in half
of our benchmark tests.Gigabyte GA-8I915P Duo
(Pro)-A
Just call Gigabyte’s Duo mobo “the waf-
fler.” Are you wondering whether to do
DDR or DDR2? Are you flip-flopping
between AGP and PCI-Express graphics?
The Duo does it all.
If this sounds like the perfect mother-
board for your gradual migration from old
to new gear, know that all is not perfect
here. First, while it’s absolutely amazing
that Gigabyte has created a board that
supports such a multitude of standards,
the AGP is not actually native, but rather
some kind of bridge that plugs into PCI.
And we don’t mean PCI Express with
250MB/s data rates. We mean old-school
133MB/s PCI.
We quickly determined that it wouldbe a crime against humanity to install a
high-end card into this faux AGP slot. It
doesn’t appear that slower cards, such as
a GeForce 4 MX or Radeon 9600, are like-
ly to suffer the same penalty. Like Abit’s
AA8 DuraMax, the Duo provides just two
PCI slots.
On the memory front, we outfitted the
board with Corsair Micro DDR and then
DDR2 modules to see if there was any per-
formance difference. Sadly, we found
none, which indicates that migrating to
DDR2/533 from DDR400 is pointless in
the Duo. We’re not taking this as a refer-
endum against DDR2, however, because
the Duo board wouldn’t allow us to opti-
mize RAM timing settings in the BIOS.
Interestingly, Intel says the 925X is
faster than the 915P, but in this show-
down, the 915P doesn’t seem slower at all.
Check out the benchmark chart below—
the Duo won four of our eight benchmark
tests. While we’re pretty impressed that
the Duo works as advertised, we can only
recommend this board to those who have
a need for such flexibility—and also clear-
ly understand how much of a handicap
the AGP slot creates.BENCHMARKS
AA8 DuraMax GA-8I915P Duo GA-8I915P Duo GA-8I915P Duo GA-8I915P Duo
comp default AGP/DDR AGP/DDR2 PCIE/DDR PCIE/DDR2
3DMark 2001 SE 20349 13548 13622 22793 22779
3DMark 2003 12363 8137 8140 12716 12713
3DM CPU 906 173 174 1003 1004
Quake III 522 130 130 460 461
AquaMark 3 67173 29434 29492 67261 67293
UT2003 Fly-by 279.42 225 225 276 274
Doom 3 10x7 88 66.9 67.0 87.1 87.3
Sandra RAM 4708 4547 4692 4574 4690
All tests were conducted with a 3.4GHz Pentium 4EE, 1GB of Corsair Micro DDR/DDR2, a 300GB Maxtor SATA drive, a GeForce 6800 Ultra in PCI-E,
and AGP with 61.77 drivers.80 MA XIMUMPC NOVEMBER 2004
Mobo Melee
Two Socket 775 motherboards vie for our affection in two
completely different waysYou’re seeing right—this motherboard has
ports for PCI Express and AGP graphics
(well, sort of).Placement of P#I %xpress x slots next to the x
slot gives breathing room to graphics cards; the ,%D
POST readout is nifty.GINGERMARY ANN
Needs more parallel ATA connectors.
$175, http://www.abit-usa.comMA XIMUMPC VERDICT 6
Abit AA8 DuraMaxA'P and P#I-%. DDR and DDR. Need we say more?COCONUTSMONKEYS
A'P performance is horrible and AT86 plug is
oriented poorly.
$145, http://tw.gigabyte.comMA XIMUMPC VERDICT 7
Gigabyte GA-8I915P DuoThe AA8 waves goodbye to AGP and
DDR, but we’re disappointed with its
performance.