Test System Setup

Processor: Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (Supplied by Intel)

Memory: 2x 1GB DDR2-1066 Corsair at 1:1 (Supplied by Corsair)

Hard Disk: 500GB Seagate 7200.9 SATA (Supplied by Seagate)

Graphics Card: MSI Radeon X1950Pro (Supplied by MSI)

Cooling: Gigabyte Neon775 (Supplied by Gigabyte)

Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2

Drivers: nForce Platform Driver 9.53, ATI Catalyst 7.1 and DX9c

Our test systems consist of the eVGA nForce 680i motherboard which is a "Designed by nVidia" product based on the reference design and of course the Gigabyte 680i board at stock and overclocked speeds.

The eVGA motherboard was overclocked at 503MHz FSB with a multiplier of 6x for a total CPU clock speed of 3018MHz. Gigabyte's N680SLI-DQ6 was operating at 520MHz FSB with a multiplier of 6x for a total CPU clock speed of 3120MHz.

So, it's clearly that the N680SLI-DQ6 has a clear clock speed advantage but what does all of this grunt translate into when it comes to the actual benchmark numbers?

Let's find out right now!

EVEREST Ultimate Edition

Version and / or Patch Used: 2006

Developer Homepage: http://www.lavalys.com

Product Homepage: http://www.lavalys.com

Buy It Here

EVEREST Ultimate Edition is an industry leading system diagnostics and benchmarking solution for enthusiasts PC users, based on the award-winning EVEREST Technology. During system optimizations and tweaking it provides essential system and overclock information, advanced hardware monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to check the effects of the applied settings. CPU, FPU and memory benchmarks are available to measure the actual system performance and compare it to previous states or other systems.

At stock there is very little difference between both boards memory performance. When overclocked Gigabyte has a good lead thanks to its higher high memory clock over the eVGA board since both are running CPU and memory ratios at 1:1.