Page 6
A prologue
We'll have a look at generic performance first, then graphics performance. As stated we'll be testing with a E6600 Core 2 Duo processor.
Our goal today is to have a look and see if this mainboard can perform just as well as the expensive 590i/680i mainboards from NVIDIA, not 100% fair for sure as these boards overclock much better and have way more features. But isn't it interesting to learn how a mainboard that is three times cheaper is performing?
First a couple of synthetic benchmarks followed by games. We'll take a few older games that show off CPU limitation, and secondly we'll take a look at a couple of modern games.
SiSoft Sandra
SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices, whether it's hardware or software. Sandra provides similar level of information to Norton SI, Quarterdeck WinProbe/Manifest, etc. The Win32 version is 32-bit and comes in both ANSI (legacy for Windows 98/Me systems) and native Unicode (Windows NT4/200X/.Net) formats. The Win64 version is 64-bit and comes in native Unicode format.
Do note that all the SANDRA benchmarks are synthetic and thus may not tally with real-life performance. The latter stands for whatever your environment is, i.e. which applications you run with what amount of data and so on. It is up to you to decide if what Sandra measures is what you want to measure.
We make use of a Dhrystone test, which basically is a suite of arithmetic and string manipulating programs.
Since the whole program is really small, it fits into the processor cache. It can be used to measure two aspects, both the processor's speed as well as the optimizing capabilities of the compiler. The resulting number is the number of executions of the program suite per second.
Included results vary from a single core Pentium 4 CPU at 3.6 GHz towards the Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz processor (E6600) on the various 680i SLI mainboards and even nForce 590 mainboards.
All E6600 based systems roughly perform very similar. This is the reality of today's stock clocked mainboards. The baseline is very similar whether you have a 250 EUR or 80 EUR product.
Compared to the reference nForce 590 SLI for Intel mainboard the difference is marginal and you'll also notice a NF590 - FX-62 throughout our benchmark session as well. That's the lovely nForce 590 SLI for AMD mainboard with an Socket AM2 FX-62 processor.
Things change with the memory controller though, where AMD's onboard (CPU) memory controller still hauls ass big time. Let's have a look at memory performance.
Overall reasonable performance yet on AMD systems the onboard memory controller simply overtake Intel systems. Look at that FX-62 fly. FYI: We used DDR2 memory at 800 MHz with CAS 3-4-3-9 timings on all the e6600 systems.
