Comparing the fastest possible settings, the Epox lags a few seconds behind the Abit. Overall however, it shaves a good 10 seconds off the fastest Intel boards we’ve tested.

Sisoft Unbuffered Memory Benchmark

The Sisoft Memory Benchmark for the Abit board is virtually the same as the Nforce 4 reference board, which is unsurprising because we are using the same AMD Athlon 64 4000+ CPU and Corsair DDR memory. However, the Epox board shows some inefficiency.

FarCry 1.3

At high detail and with AA/AF enabled we see very similar results due to the fact the game runs more graphics processor intensive, but at low detail and resolution we find a few FPS difference with the Abit appearing slightly faster. However, at 200FPS you’re not going to notice in a real world situation.

Doom 3

Again, high detail is very evenly matched between all three boards, but again, low detail brings the Abit and reference NForce 4 ever so slightly ahead of the Epox.

Valve Source Engine

A third confirmation that the Abit is ever so slightly, but somewhat un-noticeably faster in low detail and resolution, but high detail and resolution remain virtually the same.

From our tests, Abit K8T800 Pro board displays a slight performance advantage above the Epox NForce 3 Ultra in synthetic benchmarks, not that in a real world situation you’d ever notice unless you obsess about benchmarking scores. In gaming they appear even more evenly matched and both performed very well, over that of any Intel board we’ve tested, and remained stable at all times under stock speeds.

Conclusions

The Abit AV8 is a very powerful motherboard providing a wide range of voltage and tweaking options (especially a PCI/AGP lock) to keep the majority of enthusiasts happy as well as a wide range of features like Firewire, Gigabit Ethernet as well as the µGuru 3rd eye desktop hardware and µGuru software. Performance is also top notch, keeping up with the reference Nvidia NForce 4 board in the tests shown.

6 channel sound is now superceded by 8 channel codecs which we would like to see integrated, and there is the slight issue with some caps getting in the way of double height, full length AGP cards like our Gainward 6800GT. Regardless, it can keep up with even the most recent chipsets like Nforce 4, and still has AGP and PCI for a less expensive upgrade.

When considering the Epox, once the best performance settings were found it remained stable for the entire testing session. The Nvidia firewall software is pleasure to work with and didn’t bother me once after I spent all of 30 seconds setting it up. The 4 SATA ports are a definite welcome bonus, even if two are almost uselessly placed, because very few non PCIe chipset boards offer 4 SATA ports as standard: Intel’s ICH5 and VIA’s VT8237 both only support 2 SATA ports. The addition of 8 channel sound as well as optical and digital SPDIF is also a good inclusion. Performance is extremely good, and compared to the Nvidia NForce 4 reference board, doesn’t make an upgrade seem worth it yet.

The Abit board comes in at around ?0 here in the UK, with the Epox board around ?0. There's little difference in the price / performance ratio at these prices. If you are choosing between NForce 3 Ultra and K8T800 Pro chipsets, it would be advisable to base your choice on board peripherals, rather than performance, because they are both so similarly matched. If you're choosing between these two boards, we have to say that if raw performance and tweaking are your thing, then the Abit is for you. If you could happily trade some of those tweaks for a better sound system, go with the Epox.