ASUS M2N32-SLI & Epox MF570SLI: AM2 Wunderkinder
by Wesley Fink on June 28, 2006 5:10 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Gaming Performance
We tested with our recently revised group of game tests, which includes Call of Duty 2, Serious Sam 2, Half Life 2: Lost Coast, F.E.A.R, Far Cry, and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. All boards were tested with the NVIDIA 7900GTX using NVIDIA 91.27 drivers. The ATI Reference Board was additionally tested with a single ATI X1900XT with Catalyst 6.4 drivers for Reference.
ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe results are in red and Epox MF570SLI results are in bright green. It was a bit of a surprise that both these boards finished at or near the top of standard gaming performance. The ASUS generally provided best results among the seven tested boards, followed closely by the Epox MF570SLI.
SLI/CrossFire Gaming Performance
Both major players in the Video Market now have flagship Dual X16 solutions. SLI and CrossFire are about gaming, so dual video tests were confined to gaming benchmarks, and the test suite is heavily slanted to recent and popular titles where SLI and CrossFire make the biggest difference. All dual video testing was at 1600x1200, 4xAA, and 8xAF. Tests were also run with a single X1900XT at this same resolution. The single video high-res results on the ATI AM2 are in Orange and the CrossFire results are in Red.
You might think you are looking at results from different video cards in CrossFire/SLI performance. Here leads are larger and positions are often switched from results at standard resolution without the eye candy. ATI CrossFire is the clear winner in Serous Sam2, COD2, and Splinter Cell-Chaos Theory, while NVIDIA SLI owns Half Life 2 and F.E.A.R. Part of these multi-GPU results revolve around which card has optimized drivers available, and ATI just announced Catalyst 6.6 drivers with promised significant performance improvements in F.E.A.R. and HL2. The new 6.6 drivers will be used for testing the retail ATI AM2 motherboards in Part 4 of the AM2 Motherboard Roundup. Among NVIDIA 500 based motherboards, the ASUS and Epox were normally at or near the top of the SLI performance charts.
We tested with our recently revised group of game tests, which includes Call of Duty 2, Serious Sam 2, Half Life 2: Lost Coast, F.E.A.R, Far Cry, and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. All boards were tested with the NVIDIA 7900GTX using NVIDIA 91.27 drivers. The ATI Reference Board was additionally tested with a single ATI X1900XT with Catalyst 6.4 drivers for Reference.
ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe results are in red and Epox MF570SLI results are in bright green. It was a bit of a surprise that both these boards finished at or near the top of standard gaming performance. The ASUS generally provided best results among the seven tested boards, followed closely by the Epox MF570SLI.
SLI/CrossFire Gaming Performance
Both major players in the Video Market now have flagship Dual X16 solutions. SLI and CrossFire are about gaming, so dual video tests were confined to gaming benchmarks, and the test suite is heavily slanted to recent and popular titles where SLI and CrossFire make the biggest difference. All dual video testing was at 1600x1200, 4xAA, and 8xAF. Tests were also run with a single X1900XT at this same resolution. The single video high-res results on the ATI AM2 are in Orange and the CrossFire results are in Red.
You might think you are looking at results from different video cards in CrossFire/SLI performance. Here leads are larger and positions are often switched from results at standard resolution without the eye candy. ATI CrossFire is the clear winner in Serous Sam2, COD2, and Splinter Cell-Chaos Theory, while NVIDIA SLI owns Half Life 2 and F.E.A.R. Part of these multi-GPU results revolve around which card has optimized drivers available, and ATI just announced Catalyst 6.6 drivers with promised significant performance improvements in F.E.A.R. and HL2. The new 6.6 drivers will be used for testing the retail ATI AM2 motherboards in Part 4 of the AM2 Motherboard Roundup. Among NVIDIA 500 based motherboards, the ASUS and Epox were normally at or near the top of the SLI performance charts.
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Wesley Fink - Wednesday, June 28, 2006 - link
Asus opted to design for PCI access. With SLI using dual-width video cards there are still two PCI slots available, but the single x4 PCIe is covered. With single-width cards in SLI 3 PCI and an x4 PCIe are available.MacGuffin - Thursday, June 29, 2006 - link
The picture of the motherboard on Newegg is different: the AT review shows a PCI slot above the black PCIe x16 slot...but the retail board at Newegg has a PCIe x1 slot. Except for that, everything else looks identical. Are there two versions of this board floating around? One with 3 PCI/1 PCIe x4 and the other with 2 PCI, 1 PCIe x4 and 1 PCIe x1?Wesley Fink - Thursday, June 29, 2006 - link
There are 2 versions of the board - with WiFi and without. The retail version we tested was WITH WiFi built in.