ECS KN1 SLI Extreme: SLI on a Budget

How we configured our test systems: When configuring the test systems for this review, we first entered their system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults."  The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional (SP2) was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed the rest of the necessary drivers and removed Windows Messenger from the system.  Auto-Updating and System Restore were disabled, and we set up a 768MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.

Test System Specifications AMD nForced Here

Preliminary Benchmarks with SiSoft SANDRA 2005 Synthetic Testing

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. SANDRA consists of a set of information and diagnostic utilities that can provide a host of useful information about your hardware and operating system. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2005 suite (CPU, Multimedia, Cache, and Memory).  All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor and memory running at their respective default clock speeds of 2.2GHz and 200MHz (DDR400).

CPU Arithmetic Benchmark

Multimedia Benchmark

CPU Cache Benchmark

Memory Benchmark

SANDRA's tests don't offer anything conclusive regarding performance, but rather shed light on expected performance potential when compared to other comparable systems in SANDRA's ever growing database.  CPU and Multimedia performance were both on par with what we should expect to see with this hardware configuration.  Memory performance was at the top end of the scale, showing solid promise in this area of performance.  We'll have to reserve judgment, of course, until we complete our battery of benchmarks in the pages ahead.