Performance

When we got ready to start testing EVGA X58 SLI LE mainboard we upgraded our testbed. We replaced the Samsung SP2504C hard drive with a pair of young and fast Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000HLFS HDDs, and ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics card with 512 MB of memory yielded its place to ATI Radeon HD 4890 with 1 GB GDDR5. So, it is not totally correct to compare the results obtained today with the results from our previous reviews.

Overall, the upgrade worked well. Although the performance increased, the graphics card power consumption lowered and the level of generated noise remained the same. As for the hard drives, the outcome is actually twofold. They outperform the old HDD significantly, of course; the noise from the read/write heads is minor and not annoying. However a high-pitch whistling sound from the platters spinning at 10,000 RPM is very unpleasant. These are good hard drives, but looks like they are not quite fit for an open case like Antec Skeleton.

We are going to compare EVGA X58 SLI LE against a solution from the same price range – Asus P6T. At the first strange we will compare the performance of two testbed configurations in nominal mode. The only change that was made to the EVGA X58 SLI LE BIOS settings was enabling of Intel processor power-saving technologies that are disabled by default for some reason.

Unfortunately, Asus mainboard was often ahead and sometimes quite significantly. In fact, we have come across only one mainboard so far that would take so long – 167 seconds – to calculate 8 million digits of the Pi. You may not be surprised to find out that it was EVGA X58 SLI Classified. And again we see the same result, and again on an EVGA mainboard.

Now let’s see how the two solutions compare during CPU overclocking to 3.8 GHz and memory frequency at 1810 MHz:

In fact, nothing has changed. The minimal fps rate in Crysis Warhead turned out unexpectedly high, while in other tests things are not so rosy again for EVGA X58 SLI LE mainboard. We saw very similar situation during our tests of EVGA X58 SLI Classified mainboard, but at that time our readers expressed an opinion that the lag had to do with the additional NVIDIA NF200 controller. It was allegedly creating additional delays. As we can see now, the controller has nothing to do with it. Even without it EVGA X58 SLI LE mainboard is still considerably behind the competitor.