ABIT Fatal1ty F-I90HD - Benchmarking
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It's time to boot up the computer and start some benchmarks. There is one problem: it seems my board has a bad BIOS. So it's a no go for a bit until I get the new BIOS chip. I probably wouldn't mention it if it's the first time this has happened or if no one else is experiencing it, but it's not. Many people are reporting bad boards from the start and outside of the IP35-E, I have had issues with all my other ABIT boards and BIOS. Sometimes they just needed to sit the night and sometimes it was more.
ABIT seems to have had BIOS issues for a while, and looks like they are still there. ASUS has some methods of recovering from fatal errors, Gigabyte has a second BIOS on some of their motherboards, and ABIT has...? Well, they have a new BIOS chip to send you for you to replace, but for $14 shipped. Unless this motherboard knocks my socks off, it doesn't look good for ABIT and me from now on.
Now that I got a new BIOS chip, time for the review to continue. Overclocking this board is pretty good for a mATX motherboard. This motherboard could be pushed to a FSB of 350, but not too much further. My CPU is capable of going over 400 FSB, so I know that isn't the bottleneck.
The problem is with the PCI and PCI-Express slots. There are no locks in the BIOS that will allow you to set these at a set frequency. The good luck is that there is an option, but ABIT decided not to unravel it in the BIOS. Luckily for us computer gurus, there are ways of getting it out and being able to lock these. I have no idea why ABIT would hide these vital locks from us. They have one of the best mATX motherboards; why limit its potential? Here's a quick look at the hardware before we start benchmarking.
I will be testing the stock speeds against the overclocked speeds I got via overclocking the motherboard. I used the modded BIOS to overclock to keep my PCI TV tuner working.
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
This was a little addition to Half-Life 2 that made use of HDR, and offered a nice visual outlook of a little town by the sea. For this test I used the built-in time demo. This game will run on nearly any hardware, but will still offer nice benefits to those whose computer can handle the extra graphic settings and make the game look great. If you are really into gaming with this motherboard it's probably best to get another graphics card, but here's a look at what to expect with the built in graphics.
PCMark 05
This is Futuremark's overall system benchmark. It offers a great overview of the whole PC. It will stress the CPU, memory, graphics, hard drive, and even the OS.
The overclocking results didn't change much compared to the original results. The results aren't going to make many games playable and the graphics chip is crimping the games. If you are a gamer, a dedicated video card is a must.
Next: Conclusion >>
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