Memory performance

Nvidia gets off to a good start, as the nForce 680i SLI leads the field in our memory bandwidth and latency tests. The chipset's margins of victory are slim, but it's out ahead in each test.

Memory controllers don't always perform well when all four DIMM slots are populated, so we added a couple of additional memory modules to our test systems. On the nForce 570 SLI, 590 SLI, and nForce4 SLI X16 systems, we had to raise the DRAM command rate from 1T to 2T to get the boards to boot. The nForce 680i SLI board had no problems running with four DIMMs and a 1T command rate, though. Command rate control isn't available on the 975X or P965 boards we have, but they had no problem booting with four DIMMs without any fiddling.

The nForce 680i SLI tops the field in our four-DIMM memory tests, although it's worth noting that Intel's P965 Express does have faster write speeds in Cachemem.