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A prologue

Let's have a look at generic performance first, then graphics performance. Now we'll also insert throughout our benchmark session the results of the same tests with overclocked results. As stated we had our E6600 Core 2 Duo processor successfully overclocked at 3.6 GHz on merely air-cooling. Overclocking: Prepare to be amazed.

First a couple of synthetic benchmarks followed by games. We'll take a few older games that show off CPU limitation (once the CPU is overclocked we should see really impressive increases), and secondly we'll take a look at a couple of modern games also to see what the effect of overclocking here is.

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 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 whether what Sandra measures is what you want to measure.

We make use of a Dhrystone test, which 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.

Includes results vary from a single core Pentium 4 CPU at 3.6 GHz towards the Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz processor (E6600) on the eVGA 680i LS SLI mainboard. All the way to the right are two overclock sessions. One at 3.6 GHz and our final and maximum reachable 3.71 GHz.

You can see what an impact this overclock has on performance. All E6600 based 590/680 systems roughly perform very similar.

Compared to the reference nForce 590 SLI for Intel mainboard the difference is marginal and you'll also notice a NF590 - FX-62 throughout our benchmark session as well. That's the lovely nForce 590 SLI for AMD mainboard with an Socket AM2 FX-62 processor.

Things change with the memory controller though, where AMD's onboard (CPU) memory controller still hauls ass bigtime. Let's have a look at memory performance.

Overall reasonable performance yet on AMD systems the onboard memory controller simply overtake Intel systems. Look at the FX-62 fly. Once overclocked (raising the FSB) we see DDR2 performance crawl towards roughly 8000 MB/sec read speeds. Not bad to be honest...

We used 800 MHz SLI memory with Cas 3-4-3-9 timings.