EVGA nForce 790i SLI FTW Digital PWM Motherboard

Name: EVGA nForce 790i SLI FTW Digital PWM Motherboard - Page 4
Brand: EVGA

by Shane Unrein — Tuesday, December 09, 2008, 10:02 AM EDT

Test System and PCMark Vantage

HotHardware's Test System

Intel Core 2 Quad Powered

Hardware Used:
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 (3 GHz)

EVGA nForce 790i SLI FTW Digital PWM
(nForce 790i SLI chipset)

Intel DX38BT
(Intel X38 Express chipset)

ASUS EN9800GTX TOP

Crucial Ballistix DDR3 PC3-16000
(2 X 1GB)

Integrated Audio
Integrated Network

Western Digital 74GB Raptor
(10,000RPM - SATA)

Relevant Software:
Windows Vista Ultimate (32-bit)

NVIDIA Forceware v178.24
NVIDIA nForce v9.64

Benchmarks Used:
PCMark Vantage
SiSoftware Sandra 2009 SP1
Cinebench R10
KribiBench v1.1
POV-Ray v3.7 beta 29
Lame MT
3DMark06
3DMark Vantage
Crysis v1.21
Company of Heroes v1.7

Futuremark PCMark Vantage

Simulated Application Performance

We ran our test motherboards through PCMark Vantage, Futuremark’s latest system performance metric built especially for Windows Vista. PCMark Vantage runs through a host of different usage scenarios to simulate different types of workloads, including High Definition TV and movie playback and manipulation, gaming, image editing and manipulation, music compression, communications, and productivity. Most of the tests are multi-threaded as well, so they can exploit the additional resources offered by multi-core CPUs.

The Intel X38 Express board actually edges out the EVGA nForce 790i SLI FTW Digital PWM in our first round of tests. We aren't surprised that the results are close, but we are a surprised that the EVGA nForce 790i SLI FTW Digital PWM wins only one of the tests (Communications).