Test Setup
| System Hardware | |
|---|---|
| Socket 775 Processor | Intel Core 2 Duo E6700(Conroe 65 nm, 2.67 GHz, 4 MB L2 Cache) |
| RAM | Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-8888C4DF2x 1024 MB DDR2-1111 (CL 4.0-4-4-12) |
| Hard Drive | Western Digital WD1500ADFD-00NLR1, Firmware: 20.07P20150 GB, 10,000 RPM, 16 MB cache, SATA/150 |
| Graphics Card | Foxconn GeForce 8800GTX, P/N: FV-N88XMAD2-ODNVIDIA GeForce 8800GTX - 768 MB |
| Power Supply | OCZ GameXStream OCZ700GXSSLI - 700W |
| System Software & Drivers | |
| OS | Windows XP Professional 5.10.2600, Service Pack 2 |
| DirectX Version | 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904) |
| Platform Drivers | NVIDIA Platform: nForce 650i Version 8.43NVIDIA Platform: nForce 680i Version 9.53 |
| Graphics Driver | NVIDIA Forceware 158.19 |
The 650i SLI chipset is marketed as a less expensive SLI solution compared to Nvidia’s flagship 680i SLI, so comparing the two comes naturally. What better board to use as the 680i baseline than Nvidia’s own design? Representing the reference design is the ECS PN2-SLI2+ with BIOS P25.
The 650i SLI doesn’t officially support DDR2-1066, yet the majority of performance motherboards are completely stable using it. Corsair’s XMS2-8888 was chosen for its low CAS 4 latencies at this astronomical speed.
The only board that didn’t completely support DDR2-1066 was MSI’s P6N-SLI (non-Platinum), which consistently became unstable after several minutes of using this setting. The P6N-SLI was perfectly stable at a slower 800 MHz data rate, but keeping all systems at the same setting was most important for an accurate performance comparison. Since retesting every board at DDR2-800 was not an option, the P6N-SLI was dropped from performance charts.
The best performance comparison is one with relatively few "bottlenecks," so the Foxconn 8800GTX was chosen for its graphics power
Finally, a faster hard drive might not do much for the majority of benchmarks, but who builds a fast system with a slow drive? Western Digital’s WD1500 Raptor was thus chosen.
