Processor and Memory Testing
Our motherboard tests here will compare the new EVGA NVIDIA nForce 790i Ultra SLI motherboard with its DDR3-1333 memory against the nForce 780i chipset that uses DDR2-1066 memory and both the Intel X38 and X48 chipsets.

Test System Setup

CPU

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 @ 3.0 GHz

Motherboard

 EVGA nForce 790i Ultra SLI (DDR3)
XFX nForce 780i SLI (DDR2)
Asus P5E3 Deluxe X38 (DDR2)
Gigabyte X48-DQ6 (DDR3)

Memory

 Crucial Ballistix DDR3-2000
Corsair CM2X2048-9136C5D
Corsair CM3X2048-1800C7D

Hard Drive

Western Digital Raptor X 150GB WD1500ADFD

Sound Card

SB Audigy 2 Value

Video Card

 NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB

Video Drivers

 NVIDIA 169.25
Power Supply Silverstone Zeus 750 watt

DirectX Version

DX10

Operating System

Windows Vista Ultimate x64


First, let’s take a look at our more synthetic CPU and memory tests:

The latest edition of SiSoft Sandra continues on the tradition of testing the purely synthetic power of the processors to see how much performance software developers might be able to pull out of them. 

EVGA nForce 790i Ultra SLI Motherboard and Chipset Review - Motherboards 75

EVGA nForce 790i Ultra SLI Motherboard and Chipset Review - Motherboards 76

EVGA nForce 790i Ultra SLI Motherboard and Chipset Review - Motherboards 77

EVGA nForce 790i Ultra SLI Motherboard and Chipset Review - Motherboards 78

While the CPU tests show no different in chipset performance, the SiSoft Sandra memory performance of the nForce 790i Ultra SLI chipset is incredibly impressive!  By default, these DIMMs were clocked at 1333 MHz with tight timings and obviously this is paying off by giving the NVIDIA chipset a performance boost over even the X48 chipset using DDR3 memory.

« PreviousNext »