BIOS:
Now to provide a look down into the inner working of this board, special options, and workings of the BIOS. Below you can see some of the special options that can be found in the BIOS of the ECS NF650iSLIT-A (V1.0). It comes with all the standard features I would expect on any motherboard, such as boot priorities, feature enable/disable, overclocking options, etc. The BIOS has fairly complete overclocking features which can be seen below:
» Front Side Bus: 400MHz up to 2500MHz, in 1Mhz increments
» Memory frequency: 400MHz to 1400MHz, in 1Mhz increments
As well as fairly complete frequency control, this motherboard also has very good voltage controls. To be honest, I was surprised to see this level of control on this type of motherboard.
» CPU Voltage: 0.850V to 1.60V, in 0.025V increments
» CPU Front Side Bus voltage: 1.2 to 1.4V, in 0.05V increments
» Memory Voltage: 1.8V to 2.2V, in 0.05V increments
» Chipset voltage: 1.2V to 1.5V, in 0.05V increments
After taking a snoop through the BIOS of this board, it is at last time to get on with testing!
Testing:
For testing purposes, the ECS NF650iSLIT-A (V1.0) NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI Motherboard was installed in a system with the following additional components:
» Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor
» 2GB (2x 1024MB) Mushkin XP2-8500 memory
» Seagate 750GB SATA 3 Gbps hard drive
» 256MB Gigabyte 7900GT PCI Express video card
» Mushkin 650 Watt PSU
» Windows XP Pro with SP2
» All latest drivers
Testing consisted of running through a handful of benchmarks, plus a bit of game play for good measure. The system as described above was run through the tests listed below, and was matched against two other motherboards for reference. IN addition to the ECS NF650iSLIT-A (V1.0), the same components were installed in an ABIT AW9D-Max and an Intel Bad Axe 2 motherboard.
» Everest Home 2.20 Memory
» HD Tach 3.0.4.0
» PC Mark 05
» Super Pi 1.1e
» Apophysis 2.02
» Counter Strike Source
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