Asus P5NSLI: NVIDIA nForce 570 Intel Edition

How we configured our test systems: When configuring our test systems for the following set of benchmarks, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults." We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set memory timings for DDR2-800 at 4,4,4,12 latency. The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional (SP2) was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed the drivers necessary for our components, and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were then disabled, and we set up a 768MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.

HotHardware's Test Systems AMD & Intel Inside!

Futuremark PCMark05 Synthetic CPU and Memory Benchmarks

"The CPU test suite is a collection of tests that are run to isolate the performance of the CPU. The CPU Test Suite also includes multithreading: two of the test scenarios are run multithreaded; the other including two simultaneous tests and the other running four tests simultaneously. The remaining six tests are run single threaded. Operations include, File Compression/Decompression, Encryption/Decryption, Image Decompression, and Audio Compression" - Courtesy FutureMark Corp.

As you can see, the Asus P5NSLI performed on-par with all of the other Core 2 Extreme X6800 powered motherboards we tested, which is to say it finished at the head of the pack.  In a synthetic CPU benchmark such as this, scores should not fluctuate wildly when using the same processor for testing, as long as the core logic chipset is functioning properly.

"The Memory test suite is a collection of tests that isolate the performance of the memory subsystem. The memory subsystem consists of various devices on the PC. This includes the main memory, the CPU internal cache (known as the L1 cache) and the external cache (known as the L2 cache). As it is difficult to find applications that only stress the memory, we explicitly developed a set of tests geared for this purpose. The tests are written in C++ and assembly. They include: Reading data blocks from memory, Writing data blocks to memory performing copy operations on data blocks, random access to data items and latency testing."  - Courtesy FutureMark Corp.

The scores in PCMark05's memory benchmark were relatively similar as well, although there are a couple of different memory controllers at work here.  The nForce 4 SLIX16-based P5N32-SLI SE technically posted the best score, followed closely behind by the nForce 570 SLI powered P5NSLI.  All of the X6800 powered rigs finished within a few percentage points of one another though.