Abit AB9 Pro: A sneak peek at Intel's new P965 chipset

Synthetic Graphics Performance

The 3DMark series of benchmarks developed and provided by Futuremark are among the most widely used tools for benchmark reporting and comparisons. Although the benchmarks are very useful for providing apple to apple comparisons across a broad array of GPU and CPU configurations, they are not a substitute for actual application and gaming benchmarks. In this sense we consider the 3DMark benchmarks to be purely synthetic in nature but still valuable for providing consistent measurements of performance.



In our first tests, each platform score is so close that there is no winner here. In the memory and CPU sensitive 3DMark01 benchmark we see the Asus and Abit boards scoring extremely close at the same memory timings. Although we have not reported memory benchmarks scores in this article, the Abit and Asus boards performed almost identically at the same settings indicating the P965 Express chipset will have excellent memory performance.

General System Performance

The PCMark05 benchmark developed and provided by Futuremark was designed for determining overall system performance for the typical home computing user. This tool provides both system and component level benchmarking results utilizing subsets of real world applications or programs. This benchmark is useful for providing comparative results across a broad array of graphics cards, CPUs, hard disks, and memory configurations and it also includes some multithreading results. In this sense we consider the PCMark benchmark to be both synthetic and real world in nature while providing consistency in our benchmark results.


The margins are extremely close in the PCMark05 results but the NVIDIA platform continues to show a very slight advantage over the Intel platform. While looking at the individual test results, we noticed the Abit board matched the other boards in the graphics tests and finished slightly behind in the multitasking tests due to the memory settings. We also noticed the NVIDIA nForce 500 Intel Edition board had 19% better performance than either Intel board in the XP Hard Disk Drive Startup test, with the ICH8R Abit performing 4% better than the ICH7R on the Asus.