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Abit VP6 vs. Epox EP-D3VA

Author: Dennis Garcia

Published: Saturday, December 09, 2000

Benchmarks: Abit Memory

Now before I get a lot of flames on these benches because they are so close, let me explain. The bench reflects the Abit with the memory settings as I received it, without any tweaking (shown below). Also, I am using some VERY poor memory for these benches (my new 256MB CAS2 didn't make it in time for this review), but it is the same memory used on both boards.

The Epox board had very limited settings for optimizing memory performance and the shot on the previous page reflects the best performance I was able to get out of the board. The VP6 on the other hand, does have some very configurable memory settings, the shots below show the BIOS setting and the corresponding benchmark I was able to achieve.

One more note on benchmarking. Using the Epox board in Quake III, I was only able to get 80 fps in High Quality mode and 97 fps in Fastest. This was a huge disappointment considering the testing I had recently done on the Freeway Designs board, which was getting 112 fps and 139 fps respectively. When I swapped out the Epox for the Abit (without even reloading the OS), I was getting 113 fps in High Quality and 139 in Fastest. So now my Q3 frame rates are on par with similar systems.

On to the conclusion.