![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Wednesday, May 07, 2008
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
EVGA 750i SLI FTW
This budget SLI motherboard provides high end performance and deep features for a much smaller cost. As EVGA puts it, the 750i SLI FTW is engineered For The Win. Now let’s get to is and see what For The Win is all about.
Subsystem Testing
NOTE: For all Subsystem Testing, an Intel LGA775 Core 2 Duo E8500 clocked at 3.16GHz with 2048MB (2x1GB) Corsair DDR2 800MHz memory and 8800GTX cards were used.
Audio – Subjective Listening
For subjective listening you want to listen to something that covers a range of sound types. For this portion of the review I went with System of a Down, Mesmerized.
The MSI P35 Platinum Combo audio solution provided decent CD playback. No hissing or popping was heard.
Audio – Microphone Port Testing
The onboard audio MIC-IN port was tested using a Logitech Internet Chat Headset. Spoken words were recorded from the Windows Sound Recorder found under the Accessories\Entertainment folder in the start menu within Windows XP. The recording was made with the Microphone Boost option disabled, then enabled. The Microphone Boost option is found within the advanced menu under the microphone section within the Volume Control Menu.
The audio playback of the recording sample was barely audible with the microphone boost option disabled. There was some distortion present but it was minor. When the microphone boost option was enabled the sample had some minor crackling and popping but the sample was much easier to hear.
Drive Performance
To test the capabilities of the on board USB 2.0 connections, we used an ACOMDATA HD060U2FE-72-USB 2.0/FireWire HDD connected first to the USB port. SATA and IDE drive tests were performed using Maxtor 80Gb ATA 133 model 6E080P0 hard drives on the IDE headers and Samsung 40 GB SATA 3G with NCQ hard drives on the SATA headers. The SATA drives were used for testing in RAID 0 16k block size configurations on all applicable controllers. Testing was also conducted using a standalone SATA drive on all applicable controllers, and an IDE drives connected in a primary slave configuration on the JM363 controller All drive benchmarks were done using the open source Iometer program.
As one might expect, the controller integrated into the south bridge in a RAID 0 configuration was the fastest configuration tested.
Network Utilization Tests
Hagel Technologies’ DU Meter software was used with Windows Task Manager to determine the performance levels of the onboard network interface. DU Meter was used to measure bandwidth and transfer speeds, while Windows Task Manager monitored CPU utilization on the test system. For the testing, a 750MB Archive file consisting of several compressed WMA/MP3 files was used for the large file transfer, and 750MB worth of MP3/WMA files were used ranging in sizes from 3 to 30MB was used for the small files transfer test. The test was performed using a plenum rated category 5e crossover cable to bypass any traffic, routing or other transfer issues and possible packet loss or corruption that can be caused by a router/switch or hub. They cables were connected between two test machines, one using the onboard NICs and the secondary onboard NIC of the Tyan K8SD Pro (S2882-D) which uses dual Broadcom NetXtreme GigE Ethernet ports.
The EVGA 750i SLI FTW has one integrated nForce Networking controller. It uses the PCI-Express bus and supports 10/100/1000MB speeds.
LAN1
The small files download test had a maximum transfer rate of 68.24MB a second with a average transfer rate of 27.27MB a second. CPU usage was a consistent 13%. The small files upload test peaked at 35.65MB a second with an average transfer rate of 23.83MB a second. CPU usage stayed at 11%.
The large files download test showed a maximum transfer rate of 42.46MB a second with an average of 38.11MB a second. CPU usage was consistent at 12%. The upload test showed a max transfer speed of 23.70MB a second with an average of 23.23Mb a second and CPU usage of only 10%.
All in all the onboard NIC won’t be setting any speed records, but it is a decent solution and certainly gets the job done.
Test Systems
The following system configurations were used for the Sandra memory benchmark graph, as well as all graphs listed under the Application and Gaming Benchmarks sections:
Graphs are labeled as follows: Motherboard - CPU Clock - FSB Clock - Memory Clock
SiSoft Sandra XII -Memory Bandwidth Buffered
Note that all results above were obtained running the installed memory in Dual Channel mode.
Keep in mind that the differences between the processor used in the 750i SLI FTW testing and the comparison systems. These aren’t meant to show the 750i SLI FTW in an inferior light, and are provided for reference purposes more than anything. With that said you can still see the 750i SLI FTW delivers solid performance. The comparison Intel systems are running DDR3-1600 or DDR2-1066 while our 750i FTW system is running DDR2-800. We wanted to keep with the “budget” build here while showing what the board would do. It could run our DDR2 at 1066 without much effort though.
SiSoft Sandra CPU Operation Benchmark
This is the type of test that scales in an almost perfect linear fashion. So the results don’t compare well to the QX9770 Quad Core equipped machines. However we can see here that the E8500 equipped 750i SLI FTW is working just as it should with its two cores coming in at just about half of the QX9770 at 3.2GHz.
Super Pi Mod v1.5 Benchmark
We see excellent performance in this test as well. Though it doesn’t dethrone any higher end machines, you can see that the third and fourth cores present in the QX9770 have little effect on performance in this application as it is single threaded in the way that we run it.
wPrime 1.5
wPrime scales very well with added cores. Doing the math we can see the 750i SLI FTW performing where it should at about 2X the time considering it has half the core resources of the QX9770 systems. The difference between dual and quad core CPUs is quite evident here.