NVIDIA nForce4 SLI XE: Enthusiast Features on a Budget

Memory Performance

The memory latency test continues to show a 3% advantage for the nForce4's memory controller on the Asus P5N32-SLI over the Intel 975X chipset solutions. The ECS board's performance was competitive with the other boards in the write and latency benchmarks.

The ECS board does not officially support DDR2-800 unlike several of the other boards in the test group. In our testing, we could never get the board to run reliably at DDR2-800 with several different memory modules at various settings. In fact, the board had issues with memory performance and stability when exceeding a DDR2 rate of 720MHz.


Overclocking Performance

The overclocking performance graphs have been added to the standard benchmark test suite and should allow for a better comparison on the overclocking capabilities of tested boards. For more details on the specific overclocking abilities of this board, please refer to the Overclocking and Memory Stress Test section in the Basic Features page.

The ECS C19-A SLI is a very good overclocker at stock or near stock FSB speeds when raising the CPU multiplier, but it falls short against the Intel 975x boards when raising the FSB speeds. Overall, the board matched or improved upon the other NVIDIA based offerings even with limited BIOS tweaking options.