The Tests
Test Setup

The following setup will be used to give this motherboard the run through. As I don’t have another Core 2 Duo motherboard to test against, we will be testing this board stock and then with its max overclock.

• Case: Antec P180b
• Power Supply: Antec NeoHE 550W
• Motherboard: Abit AW9D-Max
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (Varying MHz)
• Hard Drive: Western Digital Raptor 150GB
• Video: eVGA NVIDIA GeForce 7950GT
• Memory: 2048MB OCZ DDR2 PC2-6400 Special Ops Edition Urban Elite
• Audio: Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic

Software Configuration

• Operating System: Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2
• Video Driver: NVIDIA ForceWare Version 91.47 WHQL Certified (September 14 release)

The main point in overclocking a motherboard is seeing just how far we can ramp up the front side bus. This e6700 can hit 3.7GHz, but that is only at a 370MHz front side bus. So we dropped the multiplier down from the stock 10x to 9x, and ramped the FSB as far as we could to 393MHz, a 127MHz increase over the stock settings. This gives us a very respectable 3.57GHz processor speed, whereas at stock this runs at 2.66GHz. It did take some voltage increases to get there, but that is standard fare in most overclocking.

Tests will entail

• SiSoft Sandra 2007: Memory bandwidth
• Sciencemark 2.0: Memory bandwidth and latency
• Everest : Memory latency
• Winrar File Compression
• Half Life 2: Episode 1
• Counter Strike: Source
• Elder Scrolls Oblivion

All tests are ran 3 times at stock and overclocked settings and then the average results are calculated.