Asus P5NSLI

Testing Methods:

With the exception of SiSoft Sandra, all of our benchmarks have been engineered to give you numbers that you are likely to find useful when actually using the products we have evaluated in the real world.

We are also focusing a lot more of our time on evaluating the stability of the motherboards (and platforms) using a stress test designed to highlight any of the potential weaknesses that the product may have. That involves a gradually increasing amount of stress starting with Prime95 and expanding to IOMeter and an endless loop of Far Cry loop if all is well. This is to ensure that all parts of the system are stressed simultaneously over a period of time.

We believe that the consumer is never likely to subject their platform to this level of stress and we are not expecting every product to complete an entire extended stress test. However, most poorly engineered products fail within the first couple of hours, or even minutes, allowing us to make a conscious decision on whether a motherboard (or platform) is worth your money, regardless of how well it performs in our benchmarks.

Test Setup:

Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (operating at 2.93GHz - 11x266); 2x 1GB Corsair XMS2-6400C3 (running at DDR2-800 in dual channel with 3.0-4-3-9 timings); BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC video card (operating at 670/1640MHz); Seagate 7200.9 200GB 7200RPM SATA 3Gbps hard disk drive; OCZ GameXStream 700W power supply unit; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA Forceware 91.31 WHQL.

AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 (operating at 2800MHz - 14x200); 2 x 1GB Corsair XMS2-6400C3 (running at DDR2-800 in dual channel with 3.0-4-3-9-1T timings - 5.0-4-3-9-2T for the KA3 MVP); BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC video card (operating at 670/1640MHz); Seagate 7200.9 200GB 7,200RPM SATA 3Gbps hard disk drive; OCZ GameXStream 700W power supply unit; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA Forceware 91.31 WHQL.

Motherboards:

• Asus P5NSLI (nForce 570 SLI Intel Edition);
  
• Asus P5B Deluxe WiFi-AP (Intel P965);
  
• Intel D975XBX (Intel 975X);
  
• MSI K9N SLI Platinum (nForce 570 SLI);

Because of the limitations of this boards BIOS and its 2.1V VDimm we were limited to using 4-3-4-11-1T at 533MHz rather than the usual 3-3-3-9-1T at 800MHz, 2.3V. Despite the fact the board is rated to be capable of using 667MHz memory we found it unstable in games using anything over the specified, optimised memory timings. It would even boot and run at up to 733MHz memory but in games it was still unstable. Once we had found the stable memory timings, we didn't encounter anymore problems during our performance testing.