EVGA nForce 650i Ultra: Performance on a Budget
by Gary Key on April 10, 2007 2:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Disk Controller Performance
The AnandTech iPeak test is designed to measure "pure" hard disk controller performance, and in this case we keep the hard drive as consistent as possible while varying the hard drive controller. The idea is to measure the performance of each hard drive controller with the same hard drive. We report the scores as an average number of I/O operations per second so that higher scores translate into better performance. This number is somewhat meaningless as far as hard disk performance is concerned; however, the scores are useful for comparing "pure" performance of the storage controllers in this case. Results are taken from trace files of Winstones 2004.
The performance patterns hold steady across both Multimedia Content I/O and Business I/O with the SB600 outperforming the Intel ICH7R, Intel ICH8R, and NVIDIA 680i/650i chipsets in our non-RAID tests. The Promise controller on the DFI board is the slowest of all solutions with the Marvell controller on the Intel 975X performing only slightly better. The 680i and 650i MCP chipsets are different but their disk performance in our tests is basically alike. We also ran RAID 0 and RAID 5 tests on each controller with the results being in favor of the 680i MCP by around 2% over the 680i LT and 650i MCP in these particular benchmarks. Although our NVIDIA boards generally score lower in these "pure" throughput tests, we find their actual performance in disk intensive applications are generally equal to or better than the other solutions.
Power Consumption
Our power consumption numbers are based on our test setup for this article that consists of the MSI 8800GTX video card and our boards have C1E/EIST turned off. The 680i boards lead all in power consumption with the P965 consuming the least amount of power at idle and the RD600 at load. The EVGA 650i Ultra board has idle numbers similar to the other 650i based boards but its load numbers beat the 975X and are around 3% better than the 650i SLI boards.
The AnandTech iPeak test is designed to measure "pure" hard disk controller performance, and in this case we keep the hard drive as consistent as possible while varying the hard drive controller. The idea is to measure the performance of each hard drive controller with the same hard drive. We report the scores as an average number of I/O operations per second so that higher scores translate into better performance. This number is somewhat meaningless as far as hard disk performance is concerned; however, the scores are useful for comparing "pure" performance of the storage controllers in this case. Results are taken from trace files of Winstones 2004.
The performance patterns hold steady across both Multimedia Content I/O and Business I/O with the SB600 outperforming the Intel ICH7R, Intel ICH8R, and NVIDIA 680i/650i chipsets in our non-RAID tests. The Promise controller on the DFI board is the slowest of all solutions with the Marvell controller on the Intel 975X performing only slightly better. The 680i and 650i MCP chipsets are different but their disk performance in our tests is basically alike. We also ran RAID 0 and RAID 5 tests on each controller with the results being in favor of the 680i MCP by around 2% over the 680i LT and 650i MCP in these particular benchmarks. Although our NVIDIA boards generally score lower in these "pure" throughput tests, we find their actual performance in disk intensive applications are generally equal to or better than the other solutions.
Power Consumption
Our power consumption numbers are based on our test setup for this article that consists of the MSI 8800GTX video card and our boards have C1E/EIST turned off. The 680i boards lead all in power consumption with the P965 consuming the least amount of power at idle and the RD600 at load. The EVGA 650i Ultra board has idle numbers similar to the other 650i based boards but its load numbers beat the 975X and are around 3% better than the 650i SLI boards.
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Zak - Tuesday, April 10, 2007 - link
Is there a SPDIF out bracket included? I'd find that a show stopper if it wasn't. Also, regarding the layout: with more and more video cards being quite large these days why they don't allow some extra space between the PCIx graphics slot and the next slot? This is a huge problem with mobos IMHO. Just because I want non-SLI, midrange motherboard doesn't mean I won't have a high end video card in it. Zak.saratoga - Tuesday, April 10, 2007 - link
I noticed the onboard sound benchmarks, but theres nothing about the onboard sound quality. Rightmark has a benchmark for this that take 2 minutes to run and spits out very useful information. Why not include those results like some other sites do?While knowing how it performs is great, knowing if the results are worth listening to is also important. I don't care if its the fastest onboard sound in the world, if its got poor SNR figures, I'm probably going to buy a PCI card :)
yacoub - Tuesday, April 10, 2007 - link
Added two items to your list of desired additions. If a 650i Ultra board came out with the above features, it'd be worth an additional 25% in price to me. (i.e. $125)
It's still practically amazing how well the C2D chips OC even on this board with its somewhat limited overclocking features. =)
Thanks again for a great review Gary.
yacoub - Tuesday, April 10, 2007 - link
Thanks for including the benchmarks with a real-world system. It's neat to see how incredibly different most of the test results are compared to your monster rig with XLC Flex RAM and an 8800GTX. ;)yacoub - Tuesday, April 10, 2007 - link
So don't buy this board if your DDR2 sticks want to run at 2.2v or 2.3v.
yacoub - Tuesday, April 10, 2007 - link
Ah yes, there you go:So time to wait and see if any other folks (Asus, Abit, MSi, etc) come out with a 650i board that offers better adjustment options in the BIOS.
Also would like to see a fully solid-capacitor design as well. Wouldn't mind paying $120-$125 for one of these 650i Ultras with those features added.
yacoub - Tuesday, April 10, 2007 - link
I'm really glad you posted that nice feature chart on page 2 because I didn't know that only 680i boards got the EPP compatibility. Boy it sure would suck to spend extra money on nice high-performance DDR2 RAM that advertises really nice timings when EPP is enabled, only to find out your nice new 650i SLI or Ultra board doesn't support EPP.nullpointerus - Tuesday, April 10, 2007 - link
I'll probably be getting one of these when I upgrade to C2Q late this year. From my browsing experiences, the current crop of Core-compatible boards are much too expensive or lack the new features I would like to gain by upgrading to the new platform. Kudos to EVGA for bringing a solid mid-range board to market!I'm glad to hear nTune (almost) works properly with this board. On my NF4 Ultra board, nTune crashes everytime I try to bring up the system status/overclocking stuff, and BTW the software is a pain to get working in Vista--something like six error messages come up when started without administrator permissions. Hopefully, the Vista issues will be resolved in a few months.