Review: MSI Eclipse SLI - SLI or CrossFireX: the choice is yours

by James Smith on 27 November 2008, 08:57 3.45

Tags: Eclipse SLI, MSI, PC

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qap6l

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System setup and notes

MotherboardMSI Eclipse SLIIntel SmackOverMSI X48 Platinum
Price
Chipset Intel X58 + ICH10R
Intel X48 + ICH9R
CPU Intel Core i7 965 Extreme Edition (3.20GHz, 1MB L2 cache, 6400MHz QPI, LGA1366) Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 (3.20GHz, 12MB L2 cache, 1600MHz FSB, LGA775)
Actual CPU frequency
3208.8MHz
3200.1MHz
3200.0MHz
BIOS revision
V1.1B2 (11/06/2008)
???  (??/??/2008)
V2.3 (07/07/2008)
Memory 6GB (3 x 2GB) Corsair Dominator TR3X6G1600C8D 4GB (2 x 2GB) Corsair TW3X4G1333C9DHX
Memory timings and speed 9-9-9-24 2T @ DDR3-1336.6 9-9-9-24 2T @ DDR3-1333.33
Graphics card (single GPU tests) Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 512MB
Graphics driver Catalyst 8.10 Hotfix
(8.551.1-081027a-071310E-ATI)
Catalyst 8.10
Graphics cards
(Multi-GPU tests)
ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB /
2 x HD 4870 / 3 x HD 4870
N/A
Graphics driver
Catalyst 8.10 Hotfix
(8.551.1-081027a-071310E-ATI)
N/A
Chipset driver
Intel Inf 9.1.0.1007 + Intel Matrix Storage Manager 8.6.0.1007
Intel Inf 9.0.0.1008 +
Intel Matrix Storage Manager 8.6.0.1007
Disk drive(s) Seagate 500GB SATAII (ST3500320AS)
Operating system Windows Vista Business x64 SP1

 

Tests

Benchmarks

ScienceMark 2.0 memory latency
SiSoft SANDRA XII SP2c memory bandwidth (float)
HEXUS.PiFast to 10M places
HEXUS WAV encoding
HEXUS DivX 6.8.3 encode + enhanced multithreading
CINEBENCH R10 32-bit
CINEBENCH R10 64-bit
POV-Ray 32-bit v3.7.0 Beta 25
POV-Ray 64-bit v3.7.0 Beta 25

HD Tach 3.0.4.0 - SATA average read speed
HD Tach 3.0.4.0 - SATA burst speed
HD Tach 3.0.4.0 - USB average read speed
HD Tach 3.0.4.0 - FireWire average read speed

Company of Heroes: Opposing Forces v2.301 DX9 - 1,024x768 0xAA, 1,920x1,200 4xAA, 2,560x1,600 4xAA

 

Testing notes

Due to the differences and thus incompatibility between the LGA775 socket used on the X48 Platinum and the LGA1366 socket used on the MSI Eclipse, it wasn't possible to run identical processors, obviously.

Thus the X48 Platinum was run with the QX9770 instead of our usual QX9650 CPU. In addition we've added the numbers for the Core i7 965 EE on Intel's SmackOver board which was used for our Core i7 performance analysis.

We would have liked to include DDR3-1,600 numbers for some of the tests, but as mentioned on the previous page, it wasn't possible to get our Corsair DDR3-1,600 triple-channel kit running stable on this board.

When running the tests with Intel Turbo Boost tech. enabled, the BIOS defaults of x26, x25, x25, x25 (1-core, 2-cores, 3-cores, 4-cores) were used, thus resulting in a CPU clock-speed of 3.46GHz in single-threaded applications and 3.33GHz in multi-threaded apps.

We'd normally include three games in our 3D analysis when testing motherboards, however due to extremely high variances noticed in the Quake 4 results on both MSI boards, they wouldn't reflect the true performance in that game and thus were omitted.