ASUS P5NSLI: Core 2 Duo and SLI on a Budget

Gaming Performance - E6300/7600GS

While Sandra and Super Pi provide useful information on how memory performs without the influence of other components, our first round of real world tests has shown there is not a noticeable difference in performance between DDR2-533 and DDR2-800 except with the NVIDIA 570SLI chipset. However, our next set of real-world benchmarks consists of gaming benchmarks. Due to the amount of information and the relative closeness of the scores we are not utilizing zero based charts as the line graphs would stack on each other. Although the data chart tells the story we felt like there should be some separation in the line graphs to accurately depict the information. Zero-based graphs are available by clicking on the charts below if you would like to see the bigger picture.

We are utilizing Half Life 2 and Quake 4 in our testing because they are sensitive to memory bandwidth changes. We added Serious Sam 2 to our benchmark mix because it is typically very GPU dependent and we will see the effects of our memory/GPU choices on these games. We tested at both 1024x768 (E6300) and 1280x1024 (E6700) resolutions at High Quality settings with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x antistrophic filtering enabled at 1280x1024.

Click for Zero-based Graph

Our two memory sensitive games show a pattern with the ASUS P5NSLI motherboard performing extremely well at all memory settings with a constant scaling in performance even in the GPU limited Serious Sam 2. The 570SLI results in gaming are almost opposite of our synthetic and application benchmarks. It appears the old adage that NVIDIA hardware runs best on NVIDIA hardware is true in this case. This is a very small sampling of games at this time and the GPU choice does not match what most buyers of this board would run. However, we find this result interesting from a viewpoint that memory bandwidth is extremely important for the 570SLI to operate at an optimum level.

Gaming Performance - E6700/7950GX2

Click for Zero-based Graph

We see the performance of the Intel P965 leading the NVIDIA 570SLI in our memory sensitive games once we introduce our E6700 processor and 7950GX2 video card. These results are more in alignment with the synthetic benchmark results where the P965 had the highest Unbuffered memory scores along with the lowest latencies overall. While the 570SLI scales well, the P965 chipset's superior bandwidth just outperforms the 570SLI in this situation. The result in Serious Sam 2 shows the 570SLI performing better in a GPU limited situation where NVIDIA typically shines. Once again we see the 570SLI scaling well as we improve bandwidth.