EVGA nForce 650i Ultra: Performance on a Budget

Multitasking Performance

We devised a script that would compress our standard test folder consisting of 444 files, ten subfolders, and 602MB worth of data, convert a 137MB High Definition QuickTime movie clip to a 37MB MPEG-4 format, play back the first two chapters of Office Space with PowerDVD, and run our AVG anti-virus program in the background. We stop the script when the file compression and video conversion are complete. This is a very taxing script for the CPU, Memory, and Storage subsystem. We also found it to be a good indicator of system stability during our overclocking testing.


The performance difference basically mirrors our PCMark 2005 tests with the ASUS, MSI, and EVGA boards finishing at the top due to great disk performance, although the Intel boards consistently completed the QuickTime Conversion first. The differences in this test between the ASUS and EVGA boards were minimal with WinRAR showing the only measurable benefits due to tighter memory sub-timings on the ASUS Plus board.

Media Encoding Performance

Our first encoding test is quite easy - we take our original Office Space DVD and use AnyDVD Ripper to copy the full DVD to the hard drive without compression, thus providing an almost exact duplicate of the DVD. We then fire up Nero Recode 2, select our Office Space copy on the hard drive, and perform a shrink operation to allow the entire movie along with extras to fit on a single 4.5GB DVD disc. We leave all options on their defaults except we turn off the advanced analysis option. The scores reported include the full encoding process and are represented in seconds, with lower numbers indicating better performance.


We expected a stronger finish from the EVGA 650i Ultra board in this test based upon previous results. With CPU throughput and disk access times being the critical factors affecting test scores this board should have scored near or at the top. We ran this test with slightly tighter memory sub-timings and also tried 2T timings with 3-3-3-8 settings but the score remained constant at 223 seconds. In this particular test we feel like CPU throughput is slightly hindering the board's performance, although this is not true in every benchmark. We say this because the disk access time and transfer rate for the video files were the best in our secondary tests measuring disk throughput.

Audio Encoding Performance

While the media encoding prowess of the boards was superb in our initial media encoding testing, we wanted to see how they faired on the audio side. Our audio test suite consists of Exact Audio Copy v095.b4 and LAME 3.98a3. We utilize the INXS Greatest Hits CD that contains 16 tracks totaling 606MB of one time '80s hits. We set up EAC for variable bit rate encoding, burst mode for extraction, use external program for compression, and to start the external compressor upon extraction (EAC will read the next track while LAME is working on the previous track, thus removing a potential bottleneck with the optical drive). We also set the number of active threads to two to ensure both cores are active during testing. The results are presented in seconds for the encoding process, with lower numbers being better.

Our Plextor drive consistently took two minutes and nine seconds to read all sixteen tracks. This means our test systems are only utilizing one core during testing until the midway point of the extraction process where the drive speed begins exceeding the capability of the encoder and requires the use of a second thread.


Unlike the media encoding section we see the EVGA 650i Ultra scoring extremely well in a benchmark where CPU and Disk throughput are very important. Based on our previous results we would have to say that disk access and transfer speeds greatly assisted our EVGA board in obtaining the top score in this benchmark.

File Compression Performance

In order to save space on our hard drives and to provide another CPU crunching utility, we will be reporting our file compression results with the latest version of WinRAR that fully supports multi-treaded operations and should be of particular interest for those users with dual core or multi-processor systems. Our series of file compression tests utilizes WinRAR 3.62 to compress our test folder that contains 444 files, ten subfolders, and 602MB worth of data. All default settings are utilized in WinRAR along with our hard drive being defragmented before each test.


The performance of the EVGA 650i Ultra in this benchmark really disappointed us after the ASUS Plus results in our last article. We thought the code had been cracked on the NVIDIA boards and performance would be more competitive in the future with this benchmark. Our 650i board scored near the bottom of the pack but still bested several other boards with NVIDIA chipsets. We tried several combinations of memory modules and timings to no avail in this benchmark. As they say, "It is what it is." In this case that means it's slow.