NVIDIA nForce4 SLI XE: Enthusiast Features on a Budget

General Performance & Encoding

The 3DMark series of benchmarks developed and provided by FutureMark are among the most widely used tools for benchmark reporting and comparisons. Although the benchmarks are very useful for providing apple to apple comparisons across a broad array of GPU and CPU configurations they are not a substitute for actual application and gaming benchmarks. In this sense we consider the 3DMark benchmarks to be purely synthetic in nature but still valuable for providing consistent measurements of performance.

The ECS C19-A SLI is very competitive with the Intel 975X and 945P based boards while scoring consistently near the NVIDIA based boards in our testing. The ECS board also performs very well in the encoding tests, which traditionally have favored the Intel based chipset solutions.