ECS KN1 SLI Extreme Motherboard

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Published:

Nicholas Hart
Kurtis
ECS
Feb. 7, 2006

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Test Setup

Hardware:

ECS KN1 SLI Extreme
AMD Athlon 64 3500+
1GB Corsair Xpert RAM
80GB Seagate 7200.9 SATA HDD
ATI Radeon X850XT x16 video
Zalman CNPS7000-Cu CPU heatsink
Enermax Liberty 500w SLI-ready power supply
Pioneer 16x DVD-ROM drive

OS & Drivers:

Windows XP Pro
Windows XP Service Pack 2
nVidia nForce Chipset for AMD 6.70
ATI Catalyst driver only 5.115
Latest audio and network drivers from ECS website

Synthetic Benchmarks

PCMark "05

PCMark 05 attempts to measure real-world performance using synthetic benchmarks rather than retail applications. Each test attempts to isolate one facet of system performance and the test results are combined to give a single score.

PCMark '05

BFG nForce4 Ultra

ECS KN1 SLI Extreme

3779

3743

PCMarks

4500

There is only about a 1% difference in score in PCMark, in favor of the BFG board.

SiSoft Sandra

Sandra is a system information and diagnostic tool that also comes with some synthetic benchmarks for judging system performance. We ran the Memory Bandwidth benchmark to compare RAM performance between our board contenders.

SiSoft Sandra
(Show All Graphs)

RAM Bandwidth Int Buffered

RAM Bandwidth Float Buffered

ECS KN1 SLI Extreme

BFG nForce4 Ultra

5986

4939

Score

7000

RAM Bandwidth Int Buffered

RAM Bandwidth Float Buffered

ECS KN1 SLI Extreme

BFG nForce4 Ultra

5916

4940

Score

7000

Well that is one hefty difference in memory bandwidth in favor of the ECS KN1 SLI Extreme. So much so in fact that I re-ran the benchmark on both boards a couple more times to make sure I hadn't done something wrong. Reruns showed that this was no anomaly. Keep in mind that while the difference here is huge, these numbers are only theoretical limits and it's obvious from previous benchmark scores that they don't impact performance to a large degree.

RightMark

The RightMark 3D Sound CPU Utilization test measures the impact of various audio processing techniques on the system processor. Scores are given as a percentage of CPU utilization with lower being better. RightMark 3D Sound also tests EAX functionality if it is supported by your hardware.

RightMark
(Show All Graphs)

Empty CPU

DirectSound 2D

DirectSound 3D

DirectSound 3D + EAX

ECS KN1 SLI Extreme

BFG nForce4 Ultra

.77

.81

% CPU Utilization

Empty CPU

DirectSound 2D

DirectSound 3D

DirectSound 3D + EAX

ECS KN1 SLI Extreme

BFG nForce4 Ultra

2.67

3.30

% CPU Utilization

Empty CPU

DirectSound 2D

DirectSound 3D

DirectSound 3D + EAX

ECS KN1 SLI Extreme

BFG nForce4 Ultra

5.94

6.88

% CPU Utilization

Empty CPU

DirectSound 2D

DirectSound 3D

DirectSound 3D + EAX

ECS KN1 SLI Extreme

BFG nForce4 Ultra

6.31

7.77

% CPU Utilization

Despite using the same audio codec chip, the BFG has to work a little harder for audio processing than the ECS board.

IOMeter

As the name would suggest, IOMeter is an IO subsystem performance measurement tool. We have created a custom access spec which runs for a 10 minute duration and includes a mix of transfer modes.

IOMeter

MB / second

ECS KN1 SLI Extreme

BFG nForce4 Ultra

36.64

33.81

MB/s

IOMeter

CPU Utilization

ECS KN1 SLI Extreme

BFG nForce4 Ultra

% CPU

The KN1 SLI Extreme has the advantage in IO performance and also in CPU utilization. As with the other tests, the difference is very small.

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Page 5 of 8

Next >>

Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: Board Layout
Page 3: Bundles and Extras
Page 4: Software (and fun with Tech Support)
Page 5: Test Setup and Synthetic Benchmarks
Page 6: Real-World Benchmarks
Page 7: Overclocking
Page 8: Conclusion

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