by Rob Williams on August 5, 2008 in Motherboards
Need an SLI motherboard but have less than $200 to spend? No need to stress, as the 750i SLI chipset was designed with you in mind. We are taking a look at how eVGA put the chipset to good use in the form of their 750i SLI FTW board, which offers solid performance and overclocking-ability, in addition to great board design.
Simpli Software HD Tach RW 3
To test the storage subsystem, we rely on Simpli Software’s HD Tach, a superb storage benchmarking tool that’s now free for everyone to use. It excels at benchmarking a variety of internal and external storage devices, and produces consistent data and information-rich reports.
For this review, HD Tach will be used to test the internal hard drive’s data transfer rates. Since the main system drive is being tested, which contains the operating system software, we will only be performing read tests, not write tests (which might cause data corruption.) Also, since we’re not specifically interested in the drive’s performance per se, we won’t be running any access time testing.
Interestingly, the drive performance proved the worst on the eVGA board, although not by a large margin. The notable difference was with the burst speed, although the importance of that in real-world application is negligible.
SiSoftware Sandra XII 2008 SP2
SiSoft’s Sandra benchmarking package has long been one of our favorite tools, because of its comprehensive set of specific hardware benchmarks. It delivers excellent consistency, and offers a variety of tests devoted to the memory subsystem. Here, we’ll use it to test memory bandwidth and latency.
Likewise to the HD Tach test, the SLI FTW board came real close to entering the 6000 number-range in the bandwidth test. The latencies also proved less-than-stellar, but wasn’t far different than the others, whether it was DDR2 or DDR3.