XFX nForce 790i Ultra SLI Motherboard

Vote: Thumbs Down or Thumbs Up Our Rating: 91%       Manufacturer: XFXforce

Test System

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 @ 3.16GHz (9.5x333MHz)

Memory: 2x 1GB DDR3-1600XMP OCZ (Supplied by OCZ)

Hard Disk: 500GB Western Digital SE16 (Supplied by Western Digital)

Graphics Card: MSI GeForce 8800GTS 640MB (Supplied by MSI)

Cooling: GIGABYTE 3D Galaxy II (Supplied by GIGABYTE)

Operating System: Microsoft Windows Vista SP1

Drivers: nForce Driver 15.17, Forceware 175.16

Now we move into our benchmarking tests. Today we have the 790i SLI trio in the form of the ZOTAC 790i SLI, MSI P7N2 Diamond and of course the XFX 790i. Both ZOTAC and XFX are reference clones, where MSI has made some changes with pleasing results.

Our stock tests were done with the memory set to 1333MHz which is the highest JEDEC recognised settings. When we ran our overclocked setups, the MSI P7N2 Diamond was at 561MHz, ZOTAC at 556MHz and the XFX at 558MHz. The memory as always is set to 1:1 to prevent it being the bottleneck.

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.

First, we start with the memory performance. Here the ZOTAC and XFX tie it up; no discernable differences at stock or when overclocked. MSI only gets a couple of extra marks here, but nothing to really say it’s a clear winner.