SiSoft Sandra 2007 Pro.
These include the Processor Arithmetic Bench, the Processor Multi-Media Bench
and the Memory Bandwidth Benchmark. As you will see below, the nForce
590 chipset certainly holds its own as far as SiSoft Sandra is concerned.
A simple and straight forward benchmark. Super Pi is
coded to calculate the value of Pi to a certain preselected digit. In
our instance here, to the two millionth digit and record how long it takes a
system to do this. I was expecting some truly astonishing results but
only ended up with 2M clocking in at 90 seconds.
Gaming is one of those benchmarking issues where lots of sites
tread lightly. Here at the OCC, we choose not to tread lightly and speak
our mind freely. A true gaming benchmark to test a product's quality for
gaming, should be a game - end of story. A synthetic benchmark can give
you an indication of feature implementation but not actual gameplay. I
want to say this to explain our using FutureMark's 3D Mark 2006 here. In
the absence of an apples to apples comparison product, a FRAPS frame graph
isn't going to do anything for you. As far as this mainboard is
concerned and because we don't have any direct comparison units to use, we are
using FutureMark to give you at least a flavor of what performance we are
seeing.
Fox Live
Earlier we mentioned some rather exciting software Foxconn and
NVidia have and have included with the Foxconn C51XEM2AA mainboard. The
first is Foxconn's LiveUpdate program. BIOS, Drivers and Utilities are
all updateable at the touch of a button and all from within a Window's
environment. The Foxconn program made updating the board's BIOS and
drivers an absolute breeze. I'll never, EVER, purchase a board
without this type of feature on it for personal use again. Here's a
quick shot of what the menu screen looks like. Again, kudos to Foxconn
for being so careful to make their menus so intuitive. Nice job.
NVidia nTune
Now the heart of the show. Maybe I've been asleep behind
the wheel but I had not yet played with any of NVidia's nTune program until
this review. Look at the window below and you will figure out exactly
what I mean.
All from within a window's environment! Motherboard
settings, GPU settings and Dynamic BIOS adjustment are all available right
here. Remember, I said the lack of smart fan controls or trips within
the BIOS was no big deal because...? Look to the right side of the first
pic below. nTune has it all! A picture is says it all in this
case!
Last we have nTune's automatic overclocking program that does a
lot more than just feel out some megahertz. Three options are offered,
Course (takes approx 20mins), Fine (can take up to three hours) and a manual
custom setting. Not only with the click of a button is the CPU
overclocked but so is the PCI-E bus and the VGA's core and memory clock.
What was nice was that the overclocking settings it arrived at matched nicely
to the ones I had done by hand earlier for both the CPU and the CPU.
BACK
NEXT
Pg 1 - Introduction / What you get
Pg 2 - Layout
Pg 3 -
Layout / BIOS
Pg 4 - BIOS / Performance
Pg 5 - Performance / Fox Liveupdate / NVidia nTune
Pg 6 - Overclocking / Conclusion
