This SLI ready motherboard having NVIDIA nForce 650i chipset supports Intel
Core2 Extreme, Core 2 Quad, Core 2 Duo, Pentium D, Pentium 4 and Celeron D
processors. This motherboard is meant for budget conscious buyers, especially
those on the lookout for high end performance and gaming motherboards. It
features 2 PCI Express x16 slots, 2 PCI Express x1 and three 32-bit PCI v2.3
compliant slots. Apart from these it also has 2 IDE, 4 SATA and 1 onboard
Gigabit LAN port. On the back panel one can find 4 USB, 1 serial and 2 PS/2
ports.
We tested it using Intel Core 2 Duo 2.6 GHz processor with 1 GB RAM, Windows
XP SP1 and 120 GB HDD. In 3D Mark 05 and 06 the scores were 12,664 3D Marks and
6,466 3D Marks, which are even better than the high-end Asus P5K3 (reviewed this
month). In PC Mark 05 this motherboard crossed Gigabyte P53-DQ6 (reviewed this
month) with a score of 6,979 PCMarks. In Doom3, it gave a maximum of 198.5 FPS
which is again a good score. In CINEBENCH 10, when rendering with a single CPU,
it gave 2,721 CB-CPU and rendering with two CPUs it gave 5007 CB-CPU, slightly
less than Asus P5K3.
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Bottomline: A great deal if you're
looking for a high performance motherboard with decent features at a cheap
price.