NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI for AMD Round Up: GIGABYTE, MSI and ASUS

Test Systems Specifications NVIDIA 590 SLI All the Way

Futuremark PCMark05 Synthetic CPU and Memory Assessment

Starting off the performance testing of the three 590 SLI based motherboards, we ran both CPU and Memory performance modules of FutureMark's PCMark05.  Each results graph is prefaced by FutureMark's explanation of what each test does to arrive at its scoring metric.

"The CPU test suite is a collection of tests that are run to isolate the performance of the CPU. The CPU Test Suite also includes multithreading: two of the test scenarios are run multithreaded; the other including two simultaneous tests and the other running four tests simultaneously. The remaining six tests are run single threaded. Operations include, File Compression/Decompression, Encryption/Decryption, Image Decompression, and Audio Compression" - Courtesy FutureMark Corp.

Each system ran very close, as expected, with the GIGABYTE and ASUS boards nearly tied and the MSI K9N Diamond trailing by a mere 17 points.  All told, this test shows the trio in a dead heat.

"The Memory test suite is a collection of tests that isolate the performance of the memory subsystem. The memory subsystem consists of various devices on the PC. This includes the main memory, the CPU internal cache (known as the L1 cache) and the external cache (known as the L2 cache). As it is difficult to find applications that only stress the memory, we explicitly developed a set of tests geared for this purpose. The tests are written in C++ and assembly. They include: Reading data blocks from memory, Writing data blocks to memory performing copy operations on data blocks, random access to data items and latency testing."  - Courtesy FutureMark Corp.

With memory performance, the K9N Diamond was the top performer, offering up a performance advantage of roughly 1-1.5%, again not much but there are some subtle differences evident.