AnandTech: ASUS P5N-E SLI: NVIDIA's 650i enters with a Bang

General Application Performance

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The performance of the board in our application benchmarks was good and the board seemed a bit more responsive than the 680i, although the benchmarks were a tossup. While not directly competitive with the Intel P965 in our Nero Recode Test, we did find the board to perform consistently close in our full application benchmark test suite that includes audio/video benchmarks not listed in our preview. However, our 975X and P965 chipsets still offer the best overall performance.

In our Nero Recode test we consistently found the performance of the 680i/650i to be lacking due to disk access issues. The conversion process would consistently slow down while the disk was being accessed. The quality of the video conversion was not affected but it appears under heavy CPU usage that disk performance suffers at this time with both NVIDIA chipsets.

Synthetic Graphics Performance

The 3DMark series of benchmarks developed and provided by Futuremark are among the most widely used tools for benchmark reporting and comparisons. Although the benchmarks are very useful for providing apple to apple comparisons across a broad array of GPU and CPU configurations they are not a substitute for actual application and gaming benchmarks. In this sense we consider the 3DMark benchmarks to be purely synthetic in nature but still very valuable for providing consistent measurements of performance.

In our 3DMark06 test, each platform score is basically the same although we see the DFI RD600 based motherboard leading slightly. We attribute this slight difference to the automatic overclocking of the PCI Express graphics slot to 125MHz with our ATI X1950XT. This feature is included in the LinkBoost technology featured on the NVIDIA 680i motherboards when utilizing an approved NVIDIA graphics card. In the more memory and CPU sensitive 3DMark01 benchmark we see the Intel 975X board pulling away from the other boards due to its superior memory bandwidth at stock settings. Even though this holds true to some degree for the ASUS P5B-E based on the P965 chipset, we see it scoring slightly lower than our NVIDIA solutions due to relaxed MCH timings that allow it to excel in overclocking with FSB rates consistently hitting 520+. Although our reported Sandra memory bandwidth scores along with Memtest86 testing consistently show the RD600 performing better than the 680i or 650i, our 3D01 benchmark is not showing this advantage. NVIDIA based chipsets perform very well in graphics tests and the scores from our Intel DB975XBX2 indicate a highly tuned system.

General System Performance

The PCMark05 benchmark developed and provided by Futuremark was designed for determining overall system performance for the typical home computing user. This tool provides both system and component level benchmarking results utilizing subsets of real world applications or programs. The benchmark is useful for providing comparative results across a broad array of Graphics subsystems, CPU, Hard Disk, and Memory configurations along with multithreading results. In this sense we consider the PCMark benchmark to be both synthetic and real world in nature while providing consistency in our benchmark results.

The ASUS 650i is competitive in this benchmark although we expected slightly better performance based upon our other scores. The 650i and 680i scored very well on the single task disk benchmarks and both performed almost equally on the graphics subsystem tests where they led the field. However, our 975X and P965 chipset boards won the multitasking tests while the RD600 finished in the middle on most of the tests.