| ASUS Striker II NSE nForce 790i SLI Motherboard |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Motherboards | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Written by Olin Coles | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Wednesday, 28 May 2008 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
ASUS Striker II NSE MotherboardWhen Benchmark Reviews visited with NVIDIA at the 2008 CES and first learned that Triple- Quad- and Hybrid-SLI Technology was going to be possible with the nForce 790i SLI chipset, I was curious just how well this news would be received by enthusiasts. After all, America was in a recession whether the government was willing to admit it or not, and this was going to be NVIDIA's crown-jewel product offering with a royal price tag. My skepticism also took into consideration the drought of high-profile video games for the PC platform. Among the very short list of titles that could possibly benefit from the multi-card SLI arrays was Crysis, which was already playable so long as higher post-processing effects were turned down. It seemed like bad timing all the way around, similar to Solid State Drives and DDR3. Great ideas; but not the greatest launch environments. Months later, on 18 March 2008 NVIDIA launched the GeForce 9800 GX2, making Quad-SLI a reality. Although there were no new games capable of taxing this powerful new graphics card, there wasn't much hesitation from the gaming community to test the performance. Having seen the GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB video card launch a few days prior, the birth of three new SLI orientations had become official. The remaining question would then become whether or not gamers and enthusiasts would create a worthwhile demand. More than anything else, the new NVIDIA nForce 790i Ultra SLI chipset is designed for next‐generation processor technologies, and supports 3‐way SLI, Quad SLI, DDR3 with EPP 2, PCI Express 2.0, 1600 FSB CPUs, and the meticulous hardware control via the Enthusiast System Architecture (ESA). The ASUS Striker II NSE nForce 790i SLI motherboard provides true triple PCIe 2.0/16x lanes with support for 3‐Way SLI and Quad SLI. It includes 60 PCI Express lanes and 10 links, six SATA ports, one eSATA port, 10 USB, and two Gigabit Ethernet NVIDIA MAC, ATA‐133 interface, two PCI slots, and HD audio. Impressive right?
The Ultimate Gaming/Overclocking PlatformASUS labels its Republic of Gamers category to consist of nothing less than the best of the best. ASUS ROG products offer the best hardware engineering, the fastest performance, the most innovating ideas, and ASUS encourages the best gamers to join in. Here's what ASUS says about their elite offering: In the Republic of Gamers, mercy rules are only for the weak, and bragging rights means everything. We believe in making statements and we excel in competitions. If your character matches our trait, then join the elite club, make your presence felt, in the Republic of Gamers. About the company: ASUSTek Computer, Inc.ASUS, a technology-oriented company blessed with one of the world's top R&D teams, is well known for high-quality and innovative technology. As a leading provider of 3C (computers, communications and consumer electronics) total solutions, ASUS offers a complete product portfolio to compete in the new millennium.
ASUS products' top quality stems from product development. It's like learning Chinese Kung-Fu; one must begin with cultivating the "Chi" and inner strength. Besides innovating cutting-edge features, ASUS engineers also pay special attention to EMI (electromagnetic interference), thermal, acoustics and details that usually go unnoticed to achieve complete customer satisfaction. ASUS notebooks are the first TCO'99-certified notebooks worldwide. The requirements for this honor include radiation emission control, energy (battery consumption), ecology (environment friendly) and ergonomics. To succeed in this ultra-competitive industry, great products need to be complimented by speed-to-market, cost and service. That's why all 100,000 over employees of ASUS strive for the "ASUS Way of Total Quality Management" to offer the best quality without compromising cost and time-to-market while providing maximum value to all customers through world-class services. With unyielding commitment to innovation and quality, ASUS won 2,168 awards in 2006, meaning on average, the company received over 5 awards everyday last year. BusinessWeek ranked ASUS amongst its "InfoTech 100" for the 9th straight year. The readers of Tom's Hardware Guide, the world's largest IT website, selected ASUS as the best maker of motherboards and graphics cards. Furthermore, the company is ranked as No.1 in quality products and services by the Wall Street Journal. ASUS nForce 790i SLI Features
CPU Features - LGA775 Intel Quad-core Processor Ready
LGA775 Intel CoreTM2 Processor Ready
PCIe 2.0 - Double Speed; Double Bandwidth
Memory Features - Dual-Channel DDR3 1333
CPU Level Up - A Simple click for instant upgrade
2-Phase DDR3 - Special Memory power to release memory power!
ASUS EPU (Energy Processing Unit)
Extreme Tweaker - One stop performance tuning shop
Voltiminder LED - Friendly reminder on the intentional madness
COP EX - OC in confidence
EL I/O - Connect in the dark
Q-Fan Plus - Optimized quietness and cooling for more devices
Loadline Calibration - Maintaining ample voltage support for the CPU is critical during overclocking.
The Loadline Calibration ensures stable and optimal CPU voltage under heavy loading. It helps overclockers enjoy the motherboard´s ultimate OC capabilities and benchmark scores.
SupremeFX II - Listen with Absolute HD SupremeFX II delivers an excellent high definition audio experience to the gamers of ROG. The SupremeFX II features unique audio innovations for gamers to spot enemies in 3D environment during game play. SupremeFX II also provides gamers a special tool to emphasize human voices in games to help make dialogues clearer and more audible.
EZ DIY LCD Poster - Debug with Translation
Onboard Switch - No more shorting pins or moving jumpers
Stack Cool 2 - Effective and zero-noise heat dissipation ASUS Striker II NSE SpecificationsASUS Striker II NSE nForce 790i (NF790i) 1600MHz FSB Motherboard
Closer Look: ASUS Striker II NSEOver my short-lived experience of ten years in the computer industry, ASUS has never really surprised me with any of their products. I mean this in a good way of course, in the same sense that the Ferrari auto manufacturer has never seemed to surprise me. I can still remember my first motherboard from the former-Acer engineers: the Asus (they weren't ASUS yet) P2B-DS, which was a rock-solid Intel 440BX motherboard. Through the years I was touch and go with ASUS motherboards, testing their A7V with the original AMD Athlon Thunderbird processor (those were the days), and worked my way up to the ASUS P5K3. But these days aren't anything like they were ten years ago, and Moore's Law has certainly picked up the pace. Chipsets are evolving monthly now, with offerings from AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA making headlines all the time.
Unlike it was back in the golden years of computing, which for me translates into the cluster of dot-com years surrounding the pandemic fear of Y2K, these days are much less concerned with producing a solid motherboard and much more concerned with a motherboard that allows you to abuse it while remaining solid. Intel tried many years back to curtail overclocking when they locked the CPU frequency multiplier on their processors, but that hasn't done much to keep enthusiasts from tweaking their hardware to the breaking point. Benchmark Reviews has the opportunity to test one of the most capable tools for such a task: the ASUS Striker II NSE nForce 790i (NF790i) 1600MHz FSB DDR3 motherboard.
The Republic of Gamers slogan isn't just a motto, it's a promise. While I will save the performance speculation for the testing section, ASUS has made certain that RoG product lines are packed with accessories that set their product apart. The Striker II NSE motherboard is no different. It is more like a motherboard kit, since it comes with so many extras that it could be considered incomplete without them. One example is the SupremeFX II component. You may not have noticed, but without a digital coaxial or optical audio connection to your sound system, there aren't any other audio connections available to you from the motherboard. This explains why ASUS has bundled a 7.1-channel PCI-Express sound card that uses the ADI 1988B audio processor with the Striker II motherboard.
As an add-in partner for NVIDIA, ASUS has adorned the Striker II series of nForce 790i motherboard with several value-add features. They begin with a standard ribbon cable for SLI and a small PCB bridge for Triple-SLI (although it works fine for standard SLI as well). Chipset cooling is made possible by both heat-pipe evaporating techniques and an integrated 'Fusion Block' liquid cooling chamber, which is why ASUS includes the necessary barbed connection joints and hose clamps. Additional component cooling is available through custom blower fan modules, and an LCD module helps you keep on top of temperatures and voltage. Aside from support drivers on the DVD-ROM, there is also a complimentary copy of 3DMark 06 Advanced Edition and Kaspersky Anti-Virus. As an added bonus, the popular game Company of Heroes - Opposing Fronts is also enclosed.
The new LCD Poster now reveals critical POST (Power-On Self-Test) information to the externally-mountable LCD display. If a system malfunction occurs, the LCD Poster automatically detects where the device failure happened and translates the error code onto the LCD during POST. Unlike the motherboard-mounted two-digit displays I've seen on abit products, you won't need to look up a code off of an unlisted web site to find out what's wrong. From the top view of the Striker II NSE nForce 790i DDR3 motherboard you can see that ASUS has used all high-quality conductive polymer capacitors for extended durability, improved lifespan, and enhanced thermal capacity. While I personally like the industry move towards surface mounted components such as solid capacitors, there have been times when a component has caused one to be brushed off the face of the PCB with very little effort. Perhaps ASUS should one-up the industry with heavy-duty surface soldered joints, and rid themselves of expensive and unnecessary RMA requests.
The ASUS Striker II NSE motherboard is build upon the NVIDIA nForce 790i (NF790i) chipset, and offers a 1600MHz FSB to the compatible LGA775 Intel processor. Designed for Quad- and Dual-core processors, the NSE is excellent for multi-tasking, multi-media and enthusiastic gamers who have hardware ready to utilize the 1600/1333 MHz FSB. As you might expect from a company that forges the progress of graphics, NVIDIA has made certain that this motherboard supports the latest PCIe 2.0 devices for double speed and bandwidth; a feature that enhances system performance for all items on the PCI-Express bus.
Stack Cool 2 is a fanless zero-noise cooling solution offered exclusively by ASUS. It effectively transfers heat generated by the critical components to the other side of the specially designed PCB (printed circuit board) for effective passive heat dissipation. Thankfully, motherboards haven't become so hot that active cooling (fans) are needed behind the motherboard, but I think that it won't be long before we see cool air circulated under the installed motherboard. In the next section, Benchmark Reviews goes hands-on for an up-close look at the ASUS Striker II NSE motherboard. nForce 790i Detailed FeaturesOnce you've had time to allow the initial awe to wear off, the Striker II NSE motherboard looks a lot more than just a tool for gamers. ASUS also offers the Striker II Extreme, which uses hand-selected MCE chips to enable stable DDR3 up to 2000 MHz. The only real difference betwen the two ASUS Striker II motherboards is that the Extreme receives the NF790i Ultra SLI and the NSE receives a standard NF790i SLI chipset. The product specifications on the NSE state that the Striker II Extreme supports 2000 MHz DDR3, while the NSE supports up to 1600 MHz (both by overclocking). But I have some news: the NSE will do 2000 MHz too, given the right SDRAM modules. While the ASUS Striker II series does not take advantage of NVIDIA's Hybrid SLI Technology, there are still three PCI-Express 2.0 slots for running triple- or quad-SLI. But overwhelming graphics power is just one of the features ASUS set out to support in the Striker II NSE.
NVIDIA designed the nForce 790i Ultra SLI chipset to take advantage of future 1600 MHz FSB processor technologies, so that you system can scale along with Intel processor offerings. While it might not be a consumer favorite right now, DDR3 SDRAM is a certified standard, and NVIDIA backs it with their EPP 2 configuration settings.
One value-added feature provided by ASUS is the two-phase DDR3 functionality. With the embedded two-phase DDR3, this motherboard allows users to reach higher memory frequencies and enjoy better performance. Compared with single-phase solutions, the ASUS Striker II NSE motherboard is meant to ensure longer power component lifespan and higher overclockability due to cooler temperatures and better efficiency.
By now you've no doubt realized that the Striker II is loaded with copper cooling components. Think of these items as preventative medicine more than required equipment, because the NF790i doesn't really run all that hot. Personally, I am all for the idea of over-cooling the mainboard electronics... it all leads to improved product longevity and more stable overclocks. Speaking of overclock, the ASUS Striker II NSE utilizes a digitally monitored EPU (Energy Processing Unit) and tunes the CPU power supply with improved VR responses during heavy or light loading. This works out to two separate yet important benefits: more stable overclocks and better energy efficiency.
At the heart of the ASUS Striker II is the Fusion Block System. Fusion Block is a more than just complicated looks, like we see on other motherboards, it's actually quite functional. The 'Fusion' is a hybrid thermal design that combines the ROG´s renowned heat-pipe design with the additional ability to connect to a liquid-cooling system. Since ASUS took the entire integrated cooling solution into consideration of their layout and design, hardware enthusiasts can enjoy exceptional thermal-cooling improvement to the north bridge, south bridge, Crosslinx, and even VRM using only one connection.
NVIDIA nForce 790i motherboards feature the Enthusiast System Architecture (ESA) we first saw touted at the 2008 International CES. The ASUS Striker II NSE nForce 790i SLI motherboard provides true triple-PCIe 2.0/16x lanes with support for 3‐Way SLI and Quad SLI. The NSE (and all other NF790i products) include 60 PCI Express lanes and 10 links in addition to two PCI 1x slots. Near the header panel connections there are six SATA-II ports (two of which are JMicron JMB363 SATA-II ports), and a single ATA‐133 IDE interface.
ASUS took a new approach to the I/O panel on the Striker II NSE motherboard. Two USB ports are housed beside a single PS/2 keyboard port, with digital coaxial and optical connections directly below. There's a clear CMOS button, for those of use with giant man-hands who don't want to fuss with the cramped interior. A Firewire IEEE-1324 port and two additional eSATA ports rest directly above 4 USB and two Gigabit Ethernet ports. In our next section, Benchmark Reviews discusses the BIOS and overclocking strategy for the ASUS Striker II NSE nForce 790i (NF790i) 1600MHz FSB motherboard. ASUS Striker II NSE BIOSFor the past decade, ASUS motherboards have used a very direct BIOS layout. I know that everyone likes something different, but the ASUS has always done right by me when it came to how they programmed their BIOS structure. Things haven't changed all that much in ten years, which by some accounts is a shame. Should the BIOS still look exactly like it did ten years ago? The Striker II NSE nForce 790i (NF790i) motherboard comes with a Phonix Award BIOS out of the box, utilizing a Winbond W39V080A 8 MB LPC. My test unit arrived with a version 0305 BIOS revision, which seemed entirely unstable at nearly all settings. I actually changed my CPU a few times during the testing because I thought there might be something wrong with my E8200. As it turned out, the NSE is just not cut out for DDR3 rated above 1600 MHz... at least not in the 0305 BIOS. The initial instability didn't matter so much to me, as it is a standard practice to visit the manufacturers web site and download the most current BIOS. At the time of this writing, the 0403 revision was the best the ASUSTek site offered, so I requested the in-house beta version 0501. Throughout my testing, both BIOS updates would not install from the ASUS Update or EZFlash BIOS feature, and the process ultimately required a floppy disk drive (remember those?) and AWDFLASH.
Since I primarily work with Intel-based motherboards, there were a few settings in the 'Extreme Tweaker' group that took some extra attention. At first the 'CPU Level Up' and 'Memory Level Up' features seemed kind pointless, but after failing to reach POST using my settings I thought that I would give these features a try. As it turned out, they were a good starting point towards reaching my desired configuration. Once I became familiar with the BIOS, which admittedly took far longer than normal, I was able to get the ASUS Striker II NSE motherboard to overclock at the desired speed.
Next came the memory timing settings for the DDR3. The standard parameters are included in the first group, while more advanced sub-settings are identified in the following section. I don't usually go into the more advanced memory settings, primarily because I could spend an entire day tweaking the configuration to achieve a 1% difference at best. However, the more experienced overclocker will enjoy manipulating these settings and possibly even more performance from their equipment; which is what the Striker II NSE is explicitly designed for. In our tests the 'Advanced Memory Settings' were left at 'Auto', which is what I suspect most enthusiasts might use in their own configuration.
ASUS Striker II NSE nForce 790i (NF790i) 1600MHz FSB Motherboard Last up on my journey towards a decent overclock (E8200 up from 2.66 to 3.60 GHz) was the voltage settings. This is one area in particular which requires some additional attention and care. In past products, such as the ASUS P5K3 Deluxe P35 motherboard or Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 DES X48 motherboard, overclocking was a simple matter of raising the FSB (Front Side Bus) and applying appropriately increased voltage to the CPU and RAM. Not so simple in the Striker II, which has a large array of voltages to choose from:
My first attempts at reaching the same level of overclock in the X48 motherboard began by using the same voltages. When it comes to motherboard voltage I understand that what's selected in the BIOS isn't always what you get; which is why I record the configured voltage versus the actual voltage (as recorded by the motherboard). The P35 and X48 motherboards were practically identical in their required voltages, but the NF790i motherboard wouldn't budge. After many (many, many, many) hours speant tweaking the BIOS, I finally accomplished my goal. It took a lot more voltage than I had previously used, and the configured voltage was never what the voltage monitor reported, but it worked. Just in case a reader is wondering what I used to get there, the voltages below are what was configured in the BIOS versus what voltage monitor reported.
It was surprising to see that the vast majority of voltages were slightly higher than I set them, which is worth noting if you plan on taking your hardware to the extreme limits. The only voltage that showed a trend otherwise was the South Bridge Core, which was only slightly beneath the settings. In our next section, Benchmark Reviews takes the ASUS Striker II NSE nForce 790i motherboard and compares it head-to-head against the top Intel overclocker: the X48 chipset of our Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 DES X48 motherboard. Motherboard TestingTesting a motherboard is one of the most difficult tasks I've had as a product analyst. There are several different methods to compare one product to another, but even when you try to measure one against another the features don't always stack up. Benchmark Reviews hasn't been around long enough to have a wide variety of same or past-generation chipset motherboards on hand to test against, which shifts the role of our testing away from who makes the best whatever-chipset motherboard to more of a comparison between this product and other previously-released chipset versions for the same processor and memory. There is a benefit to being "new" to the review industry however, and this is that we can learn from the mistakes of others and not repeat them ourselves. Additionally, we are able to come up with new idea's of our own and introduce them here. One example of this is how Benchmark Reviews introduced the cost-per-frame analysis of video cards, which showed the price you'll pay for each frame of performance in your favorite video game. In this review, Benchmark Reviews will add to this ingenuity and introduce power consumption results for the motherboards tested. Testing MethodologyThe ASUS Striker II NSE demands respect primarily because it carries the name of NVIDIA's latest motherboard chipset: the nForce 790i (NF790i). While testing could have easily be left to a simple "this vs. that" routine, we here at Benchmark Reviews think that this is less than educating. For our tests, each motherboard was overclocked as far as safe limits would allow utilizing the exact same supplemental components. Benchmarks are recorded after each test, and a system shut down and restart followed thereafter. Because the NF790i and X48 both offer PCI-Express 2,0, we also spent considerable time testing the "real-world" difference between the two motherboards with the exact same video card and drivers.
Benchmark Applications
Test System Specifications
Support Equipment
Synthetic System BenchmarksThe use of synthetic benchmarks has never been my favorite to test hardware, but I have come to understand that they're important for comparing "apples to apples". As with any synthetic benchmark, the numbers can often mean very little more than just numbers. We don't take a high score on a synthetic benchmark to mean that a product will/should perform well, and neither should you. The difference between projected performance and actual performance is the difference between a fire and a fire-fly. PCMark05 System TestsPCMark is a series of computer benchmark tools developed by Futuremark. The tools are designed to test the performance of the user's CPU, read/write speeds of RAM and hard drives. We have used these tests to simulate a battery of applications and tasks, which will produce results we can compare to other systems using similar hardware. After a series of five looped tests, the average of the results were charted below. Keep in mind that both the Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 and ASUS Striker II NSE both shared the same hardware (specified in the Test Methodology section) and operated at the same exact CPU and RAM speed. The idea here was to isolate the motherboard to determine if one product performed better than the other. Now to be fair, I am heading into this testing without any idea as to what degree of difference in performance there might be between the X48 chipset when compared to the NF790i SLI. I know that Intel's ICH9 (and ICH9R) South Bridge has some issues with SSD's, so they were connected to the JMicron JMB363 SATA-II controller on the X48 motherboard. Just the same, the JMicron JMB363 controller on the Striker II NSE was also used for storage devices.
After one very long round of tests using PCMark05, the ASUS Striker II NSE nForce 790i motherboard is ahead of the Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 by whopping 0.21%. I hope this doesn't go on this way, or I'm going to feel like days of testing was all for nothing. PCMark Vantage System TestsPCMark Vantage is the first objective hardware performance benchmark for PCs running 32 and 64 bit versions of Microsoft Windows Vista. PCMark Vantage is perfectly suited for benchmarking any type of Microsoft Windows Vista PC from multimedia home entertainment systems and laptops to dedicated workstations and hi-end gaming rigs. Regardless of whether the benchmarker is an artist or an IT Professional, PCMark Vantage shows the user where their system soars or falls flat, and how to get the most performance possible out of their hardware. PCMark Vantage is easy enough for even the most casual enthusiast to use yet supports in-depth, professional industry grade testing. After a disappointing first day of testing with PCMark05, I hoped that Windows Vista Ultimate would create a wider divide between the motherboards and put one out ahead of the other.
PCMark Vantage was benchmark tested five times and the results averaged in the chart above. For the most part, the results were once again so close they are virtually identical. The ASUS Striker II NSE falls behind 4.64% in overall PCMarks, for whatever they're worth. The X48 motherboard also led my a minute margin in the Memories, TV & Movies, Communication, and Productivity test sections. Conversely, the nForce 790i SLI motherboard showed some strength in the Gaming, Music, and Disk Drive sections. I'm not sure what algorithm PCMark Vantage uses to calculate Marks, but both motherboards felt identical thoughtout this testing. So now that I have cofirmed two days worth of testing have gone to waste on identically performing products, I move on to the synthetic graphics benchmark 3dMark06. 3dMark06 Graphics Performance3DMark is a computer benchmark by Futuremark (formerly MadOnion) to determine the DirectX performance of 3D game performance with graphics cards. 3DMark06 uses advanced real-time 3D game workloads to measure PC performance using a suite of DirectX9 3D graphics tests, CPU tests, and 3D feature tests. 3DMark06 tests include all new HDR/SM3.0 graphics tests, SM2.0 graphics tests, AI and physics driven single and multiple cores or processor CPU tests and a collection of comprehensive feature tests to reliably measure next generation gaming performance today. Here at Benchmark Reviews, we understand that synthetic benchmark tools can be just as valuable as video game testing so long as it does not become a replacement. Since the same test is applied in the same controlled method with each test run, synthetic test tools such as 3DMark provide very reliable results for comparing graphic cards against one-another. Like any test, the results are relative, but in this particular case of comparing apples to apples the application is especially beneficial.
At the lower resolutions, 3DMark should concentrate the strain onto the video card and place emphasis on graphics performance. This makes for a GPU-dependant test environment, is is helpful in reducing the influence of system hardware in the test results.
In this series of tests, a ZOTAC GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB video card was installed into each motherboard. This video card is PCI Express 2.0 compatible, just as the Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 and ASUS Striker II NSE bother are, and therefore takes advantage of the new interface which doubles bandwidth. So far, the Striker II NSE leads by barely a hair in the 1024x768 and 1280x1024 tests.
Once all of the 3dMark06 testing was complete, the results seemed inconclusive. Perhaps it's wrong to think this way, but two entirely different chipsets should have easily shown some advantage by now. However it seems that the 3DMark06 scores indicate no real difference at all. Despite a small difference in the first two 3DMark scores leaning towards the Striker II, the higher-resolution 1600x1200 tests show the same advantage going towards the X48 motherboard. With nearly identical throughout in these tests, 3dMark06 benchmarks are inconclusive in determining the advantage. In the next section, Benchmark Reviews will compare these two motherboards using the Crysis video game. Will that prove a leader? Crysis Benchmark ComparisonCrysis uses a new graphics engine: the CryENGINE2, which is the successor to Far Cry's CryENGINE. CryENGINE2 is among the first engines to use the Direct3D 10 (DirectX 10) framework of Windows Vista, but can also run using DirectX9, both on Vista and Windows XP. Roy Taylor, Vice President of Content Relations at NVIDIA, has spoken on the subject of the engine's complexity, stating that Crysis has over a million lines of code, 1GB of texture data, and 85,000 shaders. To get the most out of modern multicore processor architectures, CPU intensive subsystems of CryENGINE 2 such as physics, networking and sound, have been re-written to support multi-threading.
For our testing purposes, Benchmark Reviews uses the Crysis Benchmarking Tool (v1.0.0.5) by Boris Vergiza. This allows the testing to be repeatedly looped for a final average score. The short benchmark test does place some high amounts of stress on a graphics card, since there are so many landscape features rendered. For benchmarking purposes, Crysis can mean trouble as it places a high demand on both GPU and CPU resources.
At 1024x768 the Striker II NSE leads by an astounding 0.28 FPS! The tension grows as I tested the 1280x1024 resolution, which resulted in a major 1.2 FPS advantage for the Striker II NSE. By far, this test showed the most difference between products up to this point. My patience wore thin, but the tests must continue and a victory must be had!
Based on our series of Crysis benchmarks, the test results indicate that the Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 is outclassed by the ASUS Striker II NSE by 0.41% margin in the 1600x1200 high-resolution tests. We can speculate from this that the Striker is somehow better, but until I see a consistent advantage of a full 1% or better, I'm not ready to throw the checkered flag just yet. So I'll give these two motherboards one more chance at convincing me they do better in video games, and then it's off to a pure GPU benchmark. World in Conflict Benchmark ResultsThe latest version of Massive's proprietary Masstech engine utilizes DX10 technology and features advanced lighting and physics effects, and allows for a full 360 degree range of camera control. Massive's MassTech engine scales down to accommodate a wide range of PC specifications, if you've played a modern PC game within the last two years, you'll be able to play World in Conflict. World in Conflict's FPS-like control scheme and 360-degree camera make its action-strategy game play accessible to strategy fans and fans of other genres... if you love strategy, you'll love World in Conflict. If you've never played strategy, World in Conflict is the strategy game to try.
World in Conflict offers an in-game benchmark, which records the minimum, average, and maximum frame rates during the test. Very recently another hardware review website made the assertion that these tests are worthless, but we couldn't disagree more. When used to compare the same component on two separate platforms, the in-game benchmark works very well. This doesn't prove to be the case when comparing different GPU's, however. A cautionary word about maximum frame rates is necessary, however. Although these readings are worth noting, the maximum framerate is nearly worthless in determining GPU power. The reason for this is simple: those maximum frame rates are collected from scenes with little to no movement or graphical demand. Obviously this shifts the importance over to the minimum framerate, which will indicate how smooth the performance will remain under heavy demand.
In the previous benchmark tests, there has been a small margin of difference in performance between the Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 and ASUS Striker II NSE motherboard. This difference has been so small, they might be called equal up to this point. In the 1024x768 and 1280x1024 resolution tests, World in Conflict maintained an average 1 FPS better frame rate on the Gigabyte X48 motherboard when compared to the ASUS Striker II NSE.,, obviously still too close to determine a victory. In fact, the tally seems to have them each with the same amount of advantage points thus far.
At the concluding of our World in Conflict testing, it would seem quite fitting that the two motherboards finish the 1600x1200 tests with identical frame rates. And after several days of testing, I feel like I've just compared different No. 2 pencils. So while the far less expensive Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 motherboard can overclock as high, and perform as well, there's still a few things that it cant do. Since our tests are designed to test apples-to-apples, it wouldn't be fair to compare an SLI configuration to a non-SLI configuration. But that doesn't mean I have to ignore the differences. I will give these motherboards one last try to persuade me, and then I'm done wasting time on benchmarks. None of these tests do a better job of isolating the GPU performance than Lightsmark does in the following section. Lightsmark 2007 Frame Rate ResultsStepan Hrbek is the mastermind behind Lightmark 2007, a program that allows you to benchmark real-time global illumination. Natural lighting makes artificial graphics life-like and real. Computers get faster, but rendering more polygons doesn't add value if lighting still looks faked, so insiders know that the next big thing is proper lighting; aka Realtime Global Illumination. Typical workloads in real-time rendering will shift, and Lightsmark simulates it. Global Illumination renders often take hours, so is your computer fast enough for real-time? Before Lightsmark, real-time global illumination was limited to small scenes, small resolutions, small speeds, specially crafted scenes with handmade optimizations. Lightsmark breaks all limits at once, running in reasonably sized scene (220000 triangles) in high resolutions at excellent speed.
Lighting is computed fully automatically in an original unmodified scene from 2007 game World of Padman. This benchmark is not tweaked for Lightsmark, and contains all sorts of geometrical difficulties with extra rooms hidden below the floor.
This scene places medium to low demands on graphics cards and tests the maximum speed with which the scene can be properly displayed at each resolution. With a large array of video benchmarks behind us, the point is clearly made. While the differences in performance between the ASUS Striker II NSE and Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 are barely noticeable at their best, there is a distinct indication that single-card graphics bandwidth and performance are practically identical. It's a clear advantage to the ASUS Striker II NSE then, because with everything else being equal to the Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6, the NSE can still accept another video card and continue climbing up the graphical performance ladder.
Our next section was intended to include the disk bandwidth benchmark tests. However after hours of wasted time comparing one ICH9 chipset to the NF790i and coming up near-even, it shouldn't come as a surprise that all of our results were equally identical. So in the following section Benchmark Reviews will introduce a new angle in mainboard testing, and we shall see how these motherboards compare in regards to energy consumption. Let's hope that this will help decide an outcome, because this might be the first time I've seen identical products from different chipset manufacturers. Natural Resources and our PlanetIt's a sad state of affairs we find ourselves in today. Our forefathers did their best to build these nations, but despite their best intentions the industrial revolution began a trend that we must now struggle to cope with. Fossil fuels are diminishing from sustainable supply, and with nuclear reactors rapidly being shut down because of drying water supplies we will soon see a major rise in the household cost of electricity. Natural resources are rapidly disappearing, along with our polar ice caps and much of the wildlife worldwide, which makes this next decade a critical time for us all. Since our planet is proving to us that it cannot sustain the present rate of human growth, we must collectively do what we can to restore some level of balance in our favor. ASUS understands that conservation is an effort worth working at, which is why the Striker II NSE complies with RoHS (Restriction on Hazardous Substance) guidelines as part of the GreenASUS feature. Once upon a time televisions and refrigerators were the largest consumers of household electricity, but over the past decade that shift has completely moved towards personal computers. While it's great that I can overclock the my processor and video card for a few extra frames per second out of my favorite games, it always comes at a cost.
But we all still like to play with our toys. While it's absurd how far some people will go for that last extra bit of performance, most of us could find a happy middle ground with high-end components running on less power. After all, who doesn't want better gas mileage? So in this section I have compared the up-and-coming NVIDIA nForce 790i SLI chipset of the ASUS Striker II NSE against one of my favorite motherboards: the Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6. Both motherboards were tested using the same hardware, and both systems were repeatedly tested for consistent results. Below are the power consumption results at standby (powered off) and idle (login screen). Test Systems
Support Equipment
Power Consumption ResultsDuring the test period the power supply was given power and left in standby mode for several minutes. This test was repeated five times, and the average for each system is displayed (although each test result was identical to the previous). The system was then powered on, and left at the login screen for approximately five minutes before the idle readings were taken and averaged. First up was the standby test, which rates power consumption when the computer is turned off.
The Standby test wasn't meant to show a difference between products, so much as it's intended to simply illustrate the power consumed by a computer turned off but not unplugged. In all honesty, it doesn't really tell much, and is probably best suited for general purpose knowledge. In the next test, we pull the video cards and take some readings... which should be a little more comparative.
I've never been one to do as others do. Benchmark Reviews is my tool for breaking the mold, and that's what I was thinking when I removed the video card from each system and powered on to an idle POST state. If anything, this is meant to isolate the motherboard as much as possible. At the end of the testing, it was beginning to look like the ASUS Striker II was actually more efficient than the Gigabyte X48 motherboard.
Once the systems were booted into Windows and left idle at the logon screen, I recorded the power consumption readings. While the X48 motherboard does better than the P35, it takes the nForce 790i motherboard to show some real prowess. Shaving a full 7W of power while at idle, the ASUS Striker II NSE is finally starting to pull away from the GA-X48T-DQ6.
Finally, after starting the system stability tests included in EVEREST Ultimate Engineer Version, each system was measured for power consumption. Coming in at a full 10W more efficient than the competition, NVIDIA (and ASUS) should be proud that their motherboard offers the same EXACT level of performance as the leading Intel X48 motherboard while still shaving power consumption by a 4% margin. It should be noted however that Gigabyte offers the Dynamic Energy Saver utility their X48T-DQ6, which extends power savings when the motherboard uses stock settings (not all that common for X48 motherboards). nForce 790i SLI Final ThoughtsIn many ways, I still see myself as an inexperienced consumer. Perhaps its the buzz generated inside enthusiast forums that has me expecting more than a product is capable, but when I was immediately excited by the possibilities of endless overclocks and better performance right out of the box. But as you might have detected from the first few pages of benchmarks, it seemed like my time was really wasted trying to find a performance advantage between the NF790i and X48 chipsets. But perhaps I was looking in the wrong places, because the added functionality of SLI paired to a more energy efficient architecture leave me less concerned about outperforming the competition head to head, and more about the what I can do with the added features. So there comes a time when you have to stop yourself from buying into the madness. The NVIDIA nForce 790i SLI chipset is excellent for overclocking, thanks to a completely compartmentalized BIOS with a myriad of settings to configure, but it isn't going to beat the less expensive X48 chipset when everything else is equal. What it will do however is deliver an opportunity to access SLI graphics power, and operate on a more power-efficient level during operation. Obviously this is a purpose-driven chipset, and not a mainboard for the every-man.
With all of it's added functionality, I have to admit a small level of disappointment exists because of the missing HyridPower and Hybrid SLI Technology features introduced with the nForce 780a SLI, nForce 750a SLI, and nForce 730a MCPs (media and communication processors); but this is an issue I must take up with NVIDIA, since ASUS had nothing to do with the design. Still, wouldn't have made good sense to give a triple- or quad-SLI setup the opportunity to reduce low-power 2D consumption more than 100 Watts? That would be a true commitment to being 'Green'. ASUS Striker II NSE ConclusionThose who know me well, know me to be a very sharp-witted cynic. So it shouldn't surprise ASUS that I gave a chuckle when I first unboxed the Striker II NSE from the shipping material and saw a giant bullet-hole at the center of the retail package. I know, it's all about gaming. But after a decade of system building I find that bullet through my brand new (expensive) motherboard is as far from my Christmas list as it can get. But I digress... presentation is well done for the Republic of Gamers crowd that might enjoy such graphics. For me, it was the Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts promotional artwork that caught my attention. But this is all just a prelude to the excellent depiction of key component when you lift the velcro-fastened cover. If you were to see this package on store shelves, it might not seal the deal... at least until you see what's inside the fold! Appearance is key to selling enthusiast products, because once the performance and functionality have reached elite levels the manufacturers must ensure that their product looks the part of a top-shelf offering. ASUS has certainly nailed this objective, because the combination of black PCB with bright copper Fusion cooling components really forces you to take notice. The additional blue and white color combinations work together to enforce the ASUS brand as improve overall appeal. For those who need just a little more than color, ASUS has also included many key components with backlit logo's or LED arrays on the ASUS Striker II NSE motherboard. NVIDIA has the advantage of having designed and produced generations of precision-built discrete graphics solutions, which is why the nForce 790i MCE is constructed with complete care and forethought. SMD Solid capacitors are an ASUS value-added premium feature, as well as BIOS reset buttons (jumper shunts are so last generation) and LCD panel, and improve the end-user experience. I do have fears of knocking one of these surface-mounted capacitors off of the motherboard during a cramped SLI installation, so perhaps ASUS can further expand their durability with heavy-duty surface soldiering in future versions. Having a motherboard that scales with your demand is always a well-liked perk, but having that same motherboard also offer excellent energy efficiency and SLI all at once is probably as good as we can expect. But that's where ASUS likes to keep us in awe, and piles on other features like the liquid-cooling functionality of their Fusion waterblock. Even beyond this, you still have the high-definition audio capabilities of the SurpremeFX II PCI-Express 7.1 channel sound card. Not to call it quits after a handful of included premium-level features, ASUS also adds a clip-on cooling fan and Stack Cool 2 backplates. Functionality is something the Striker II NSE offers beyond the level of any X48 motherboard available. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction; a principal that rings true in the enthusiast hardware industry as much as it does anywhere. What I mean by this, is that you can't have all these great feature amenities without paying the cost. That cost, by the way, scales as high as the motherboard does. Presently the ASUS Striker II NSE nForce 790i motherboard sells at NewEgg for $374.99. Priced at roughly sixty dollars more than the X48 we compared in this article, perhaps the price tag is appropriate for everything you get in the package. Of course, over time you should expect this price to fit the market, but for now this is a brand new premium product on the market. In conclusion, experienced overclockers will sincerely appreciate the extra attention ASUS has given to the NF790i MCE. Heat-pipe Fusion cooling can also integrate into an existing liquid-cooling system, or can remain stable using air-cooling. The BIOS requires a little more knowledge of voltages than some enthusiasts might be used to, but it otherwise opens doors that competing products can't. Extreme gamers will fall over themselves for the ability to stack video cards into a triple- or quad-SLI array, which offers unprecedented graphical horsepower. The ASUS Striker II NSE isn't made for the entry-level hardware enthusiast, yet it still accommodates their needs and holds their hand for the first overclocking steps. If you're willing to pay the price of admission (which is plausible considering the price of DDR3), ASUS has assembled a motherboard with unparalleled functionality and features. I can recommend the Striker II NSE nForce 790i motherboard to the patient few hardware enthusiasts and overclockers who are willing to hone their settings through tedious trial and error, as well as the gamer who doesn't know the meaning of 'enough'. ASUS has pulled every top-shelf feature they have to their name, and put it all together in this premium Striker II masterpiece. Pros:
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In 2006, the company shipped 55 million motherboards, which means one in three desktop PCs sold last year was powered by an ASUS motherboard. Our 2006 revenues reached US$16.5 billion, and is expected to garner US$23 billion in 2007.
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