Nvidia 650i Ultra

After conquering the hearts of enthusiasts with the nForce 680i SLI, Nvidia now has something to stun the mainstream users. The nForce 650i Ultra promises to ace in its category with its lavish feature set.

Features

The nForce 600 series for Intel supports the entire line of Intel LGA775 processors including the latest Core 2 Duo series. The 650i Ultra North Bridge boasts 1333 MHz FSB and DDR2 memory support up to 8 GB. The board also features a x16 PCI-E slot for adding a graphics card. Combined with the 650i Ultra North Bridge is the powerful nForce 430 MCP supporting two IDE drives, four SATA drives, Gigabit Ethernet and 8 USB ports. 8-channel audio is controlled by the Realtek ALC885 HD audio codec.



Layout

The layout of the board is flawless with thoughtful placement of components. The area around the CPU socket is clutter-free with ample clearance between the North Bridge and the DIMM slots. The North Bridge is cooled by an aluminum heatsink fitted with a 40 mm fan. The DIMM slots are also well-spaced to allow thicker memory modules with heat-spreaders to breathe comfortably. The four SATA ports are placed at the lower right edge of the board to maintain close proximity to the hard drives in the case.



Test Bed

Processor: Intel C2D E6700, 2.66 GHz Memory: 2 GB DDR2 800 MHz (4-4-4-12 1T)

Hard drive: WD Raptor 740GD

Graphics card: Asus EN7800GTX Top



SCORES



SiSoft Sandra 2007

CPU Arithmetic

Dhrystones: 24572 MIPS

Whetstones: 48196 MFLOPS

Memory bandwidth: 5755 MB/s



PCMark 05

Overall: 7527

HDD: 6726



3DMark 05: 9047



Doom 3

640x480 @low: 220 fps

1600x1200 @ultra 4xAA: 53 fps



Time taken to…

Compress 200 MB files to RAR using ‘Best compression’: 52 secs

Encode 300 MB of WAV files to 256 Kbps MP3 at high quality: 60 secs

Encode 99 MB VOB file to Xvid at 75 percent quality: 102 secs



Performance

We decked up the board with high-end components and the board cruised throughout the synthetic and real-world tests. Except for being able to display steroidal frame rates using the SLI mode, the performance is comparable to that of enthusiast boards. The BIOS offers support for tweaking FSB, CPU multiplier and voltages. Using the preset FSB to memory ratios, overclocking on this board is a cakewalk. We managed to overclock the E6700 from 2.66 GHz to 3.4 GHz by increasing the FSB to 1360 which in turn cranked the memory speed from 800 MHz to 906.7 MHz (3:2 ratio).



Verdict

If you’re looking out for a mainstream board without on-board graphics, this is the best board in the category for Intel processors. Settle for this board if you need high performance without SLI support.