Page 6

A prologue

We'll have a look at generic performance first, then graphics performance.

Our goal today is to have a look and see if this mainboard can perform just as well as the expensive 590i/680i mainboards from NVIDIA, not 100% fair for sure as these boards overclock much better and have way more features. But isn't it interesting to learn how a mainboard that is three times cheaper is performing?

First a couple of synthetic benchmarks followed by games. We'll take a few older games that show off CPU limitation, and secondly we'll take a look at a couple of modern games.

SiSoft Sandra

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices, whether it's hardware or software. Sandra provides similar level of information to Norton SI, Quarterdeck WinProbe/Manifest, etc. The Win32 version is 32-bit and comes in both ANSI (legacy for Windows 98/Me systems) and native Unicode (Windows NT4/200X/.Net) formats. The Win64 version is 64-bit and comes in native Unicode format.

Do note that all the SANDRA benchmarks are synthetic and thus may not tally with real-life performance. The latter stands for whatever your environment is, i.e. which applications you run with what amount of data and so on. It is up to you to decide if what Sandra measures is what you want to measure.

With the help of Sandra we make use of a Dhrystone test, this basically is a suite of arithmetic and string manipulating programs.

Since the whole program is really small, it fits into the processor cache. It can be used to measure two aspects, both the processor's speed as well as the optimizing capabilities of the compiler. The resulting number is the number of executions of the program suite per second.

In the chart:

• NF590 FX62; NForce 590 SLI mainboard with AMD FX-62 processor
• Jetway M2A696-GDG; The mianboard we test today
• 680i - E6600; nForce 680i SLI mainboard with C2D E6600 processor
• Jetway 966PDAG; Intel P960 mainboard with C2D E6600 processor

Included results vary from a two mainboards with the FX-62 processor and as comparison two mainboards with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 processor.

Compared to the reference nForce 590 SLI for AMD mainboard the difference is throughout our review very similar. It's that lovely nForce 590 SLI for AMD mainboard with an Socket AM2 Athlon FX-62 dual-core processor.

Things change with the memory controller though, AMD's onboard (CPU) memory controller still hauls ass big time over any Intel product. Let's have a look at memory performance.

Very good memory performance; on AMD systems the onboard memory controller simply overtake Intel systems. Look at that FX-62 products fly.