(4.5 star rating) Written by: William Ford

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Performance
I tried several times to benchmark the graphics and processing power of the system using 3DMark06 and Sandra, but neither program would function properly in Windows Vista 64-bit. Unfortunately I do not have any numbers to include in this review. I can attest to the boards ability to perform under full load with gaming, audio recording and video editing.

Using Sonar 6 Producer Edition, I edited a full 32-track mix that my band recorded last month and the processor never used over 28% total processing power. Using a dual core processor, Sonar shows the CPU usage of each core. Core 1 never went over 35% and Core 2 never passed 26% and most of the time both were under 25%. This is impressive considering I was mixing 32 individual WAV tracks in 32-bit audio at 48KHz.

My other computer, which is a Pentium 4 660 3.6GHz 64-bit processor running Windows XP Pro with 2GB (2x1GB) of DDR2 400MHz, would always have the audio drop out during the mix at least once or twice with this particular recording. This happens when the audio engine stops during playback or the processor and/or hard drive can not keep up with the audio rendering. Clearly, the new motherboard and dual core processor have much to do with this as well as the faster RAM and 64-bit operating system.

Playing 3D first-person-shooter games is also very impressive. CounterStrike: Source plays as fluid as water with all the graphics options on full. Using the same video card on my other system the game performed very well also but not quite as smooth with Anti-aliasing enabled. The frame rates were about the same during actual play, although I did notice they were consistently slightly higher (by a few frames per second) on the new motherboard. On my ASUS/P4 660 system I was getting an average of 50fps with Anti-aliasing set to 4X and a peak at 78fps with 12 players. On the ECS system I saw an average of 56fps and a peak at 90fps. This is most likely due to the faster memory bus (800MHz as opposed to 400MHz) and the dual core processor ( dual core as opposed to hyperthreading). Both processors are running on an 800MHz front side bus.

Windows Vista rated this system as a 5.0 on the performance under the Windows Experience Index.

NF650iSLIT-A Installed	Another view of NF650iSLIT-A Installed	VIew of the North Bridge cooler

Additional Thoughts

The Awesome Stuff
What impressed me the most about this board is its scalability. It has support for SLI as well as being quite capable of handling single graphics card solutions. I was amazed at how well an ATI Radeon processor based graphics card ran with the NVIDIA Chipset. I must give kudos to NVIDIA for this, their chipset solution is absolutely rock solid.

The amount of supported memory in this motherboard is staggering. I have 2GB installed and it performs like a champ, but you can install up to 4 modules of 8GB each for an astounding total of 32GB of system memory; that kind of power in a home computer is just plain scary. You could essentially create a RAM drive and run Windows XP Professional straight from memory alone... absolutely amazing.

I am also impressed with the ability to have up to 8 drives installed on this board with the four SATA drives able to be configured for RAID operation. This board would make a decent media server, file server or web server as well as a great gaming machine. The SATA controller on this board supports the SATA II standard for 3GB/s transfers.

Some Minor Concerns

The things I would have liked to see improved upon are few but never-the-less important. This board has IEEE1394 capability but on mine the pins are missing and the option is disabled. In this day and age, a motherboard should support FireWire even at the lowest available options. It is not hard to install a PCI FireWire card so this is only a minor negative against the board, still it is annoying.

The board also does not have a parallel port. This is also only a minor negative since these days most printers are USB or RJ-45 enabled, but it is still annoying for people like me who have parallel peripherals to not be able to use them with this board. I have a parallel ZIP drive, a older parallel printer and an even older parallel scanner; none of which I can use with this board regardless of the operating system I install. Again, it is possible to install a PCI parallel adapter, so this is only a minor annoyance.

The PCI-Express 1X slots are essentially useless if you want to run dual SLI graphics cards. Both of the 1X PCI-e slots are disabled when a card is inserted into PCI-Express 16X slot #2. You still have 3 PCI slots so this also is only another minor annoyance, but the 1X slots should not be dependant on or share the bandwidth of the 16X slots. There must be a way around this, and they should have figured this out and corrected it before releasing the board in my opinion.

ECS NF650iSLIT-A ATX Intel Motherboard

The Verdict
These minor annoyances, along with the upcoming release of the nVIDIA 680i LT SLI chipset, should give you some food for thought before running out and purchasing this motherboard. After all is said and done, though, it is still quite an impressive motherboard to base your next gaming system upon. With support for Core 2 Extreme and Core 2 Quad processors, it will be quite a long time before needing to upgrade again.

Overall, this is an outstanding motherboard that provides 100% stability. It is also worth mentioning again that this motherboard is 100% Windows Vista 64-bit compatible and that all features work with Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit.

Pros: Solid performance, very reasonable price, rock solid stability, compatible with Core 2 line of CPUs, variety of overclocking settings.

Cons: No IEEE1394 connection, no parallel port, PCI-E 1x slots disabled with SLI enabled.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

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