Cinebench rendering

The chipset has little impact on Cinebench scores, which are virtually tied across the board. Our DDR3-1333 configuration is consistently faster than the rest of the field, but only by a hair.

Sphinx speech recognition

Sphinx favors faster memory subsystems, and with a little help from a 1333MHz front-side bus and similarly clocked memory, the P35 Express takes the lead. Even then, though, it's just a little bit quicker than the 975X Express.

As we saw in our memory subsystem tests, the P35 is slightly faster with DDR3-1066 than it is with DDR2-800. Performance with the latter is virtually identical to that of the P965.

We should also note that despite having a clear advantage in our memory subsystem tests, the nForce 680i SLI trails all the Intel chipsets here by a substantial margin. Raw bandwidth and latency scores aren't everything.