EVGA nForce 650i Ultra

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:

Systems:

• EVGA nForce 650i Ultra (nForce 650i Ultra SPP/430 MCP);
  
• Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R (Intel P35/ICH9R);
  
• MSI P6N Platinum (Nvidia 650i SLI/430 MCP);
  
• EVGA nForce 680i LT SLI (nForce 680i LT SLI/MCP55);

We tested with both an E6300/7600 GS combination to represent a mainstream setup the board is aimed at, as well as our usual X6800/7900 GTX to offer a consistent comparison between the other boards tested. The nForce 650i Ultra optimisations on the 7600 GS were left untouched so that they could do their job, just like an end user would.