Product Listing

ECS NFORCE 570 SLIT-A (NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI Intel Edition - Core 2 Ready)

By Zachary Chan - 18 Oct 2006

Test Setup

Test Setup

To benchmark the ECS NFORCE 570 SLIT-A motherboard, we'll be using a Core 2 ready ASUS P5N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard as a comparison. The P5N32-SLI Deluxe is based on the nForce 4 SLI X16 chipset, which should yield similar results to the C19XE on the ECS board. We'll also throw in a mix of Intel P965, 975X and 945P Express results to see where the various Core 2 ready chipsets stand in the larger scheme of things. These boards include the ABIT AW9D-MAX (Intel 975X), ASRock ConRoe XFire-eSATA2 (Intel 945P) and the always trusty Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 (Intel P965).

The test bed configuration that will be used for this segment is listed below and will be the same for all benchmarked motherboards unless otherwise stated:-

  • Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor (2.93GHz)
  • 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR2-800 @ 12-4-4 CAS 4.0
  • 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR2-667 @ 12-4-4 CAS 4.0 (ECS NFORCE 570 SLIT-A and ASRock ConRoe XFire-eSATA2 only)
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • MSI GeForce 7900 GT 256MB - with NVIDIA ForceWare 91.47
  • Intel INF 8.1.1.1001, Intel Matrix Storage (AHCI) 6.1.0.1022 driver set (All Intel chipset boards)
  • NVIDIA nForce 8.22 chipset driver set (ECS NFORCE 570 SLIT-A only)
  • NVIDIA nForce 7.15 chipset driver set (ASUS P5N32-SLI Deluxe only)
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 (and DirectX 9.0c)


Additional Notes

  • Although the nForce4 series are rated at DDR2-667, the DualDDR2 Memory Architecture makes it possible to run higher speed memory. The P5N32-SLI Deluxe is one such example that the nForce4 readily accepts high-speed memory to match up with the newer Core 2 ready chipsets from Intel. The ECS NFORCE 570 SLIT-A however, does not work well with DDR2-800 memory and becomes incredibly unstable at these timings. As such, the board will be benchmarked with DDR2-667 memory throughout this review.
  • The ASRock ConRoe XFire-eSATA2 is also benchmarked with DDR2-667 memory as the Intel 945P Express doesn't support DDR2-800.


Benchmarks

  • BAPco SYSmark 2004
  • Futuremark PCMark05
  • SPECviewperf 9.0
  • Futuremark 3DMark05
  • AquaMark3
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