Testbed and Methods

In the previous reviews we have already seen that Nvidia nForce 650i SLI chipset performs close to nForce 680i. Therefore, it doesn’t make much sense to compare the performance of MSI P6N SLI Platinum against any other mainboards on different chipsets. This time I decided to compare its performance with that of the ASUS mainboard on the same chipset - ASUS P5N-E SLI. Besides, I have also added the results for ASUS Striker Extreme based on Nvidia nForce 680i SLI.

We will use the following hardware for the test:

• Processor: Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (LGA775, 2.93GHz, 4MB L2 cache)
• Mainboards:
• ASUS P5N-E SLI (Nvidia nForce 650i SLI)
• ASUS Striker Extreme (Nvidia nForce 680i SLI)
• MSI P6N SLI Platinum (Nvidia nForce 650i SLI)
• Memory: 2GB DDR2-800 SDRAM (Corsair TWIN2X2048-8500C5D)
• Graphics card: PowerColor X1900 XTX 512MB (PCI Express x16)
• Disk subsystem: Western Digital WD1500AHFD (Serial ATA-150)
• Operating system: Microsoft Windows XP SP2 with DirectX 9.0c

We did our best to ensure that the test systems would run in very close testing conditions therefore the system memory was working at 400MHz with 4-4-4-12-1T.

Performance

The performance results indicate clearly that MSI P6N SLI Platinum yields in performance to both: the mainboard on nForce 680i SLI as well as ASUS P5N-E SLI based on nForce 650i SLI chipset. Although the performance difference between them is pretty small, this is where we discovered another issue with the BIOS: it is not sufficiently optimized from the performance standpoint. This issue will most likely be eliminated in the future, but in the meanwhile the users will have to put up with the fact that MSI P6N SLI Platinum is about 1-2% slower than the ASUS analogue.