MSI P6N SLI Platinum: NVIDIA's 650i Part Two
by Gary Key on March 13, 2007 1:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Since our first look at the 680i chipset back in November, we along with our readers have wondered when the lower priced 650i family of chipsets would arrive, and more importantly how they would perform. ASUS was first to market with the NVIDIA 650i SLI chipset in late December and we fully expected to see other manufacturers following in January. It is now March and we are just now starting to see boards based on this chipset finally coming to market. MSI has released two 650i based boards with the P6N SLI-FI competing in the $115 market space and the P6N SLI Platinum should be coming in around $155 or less once supply is available. ECS has their 650i board in the market now and we should see abit releasing 650i product into the retail channels by the end of the month. Unfortunately, Gigabyte's performance oriented 650i board will not arrive until sometime in April.
The base 650i Ultra boards were expected in February but are missing in action and at this time we wonder if they will even be released. Usually we find NVIDIA based products being hard launched upon announcement day but the 650i chipset has not followed that pattern. This chipset should be the bread and butter offering in the NVIDIA Intel chipset family as it was designed to compete against the Intel P965 in the mainstream market. In our original look at the chipset we found it offered very good performance and indeed in most ways was a competitive offering to the P965.
We really liked the chipset and looked forward to seeing it and the P965 square off against each other in a myriad of configurations and price points. Sadly, it appears these scenarios will not happen in the same way that we had envisioned it after the marketing hoopla that followed the 680i launch. The 650i SLI was designed to offer dual x8 SLI operation, provide competitive platform performance to the Intel P965, and do this for a price in the $115~$165 range. We still think it can, but with the Intel P35 launching shortly, it appears that the late arrival of these 650i products is only going to further hurt NVIDIA's progress in the Intel chipset market.
NVIDIA designed the 650i SLI as their true mainstream Intel performance chipset, with the 680i targeted at the upper end performance segment and priced around $220 compared to $115 for the 650i. Details about the differences between the two chipsets can be located here. The major highlights are the 650i only supports dual x8 SLI operation, single Gigabit Ethernet, four SATA 3Gb/s ports, eight USB 2.0 ports. The 680i in contrast supports dual x16 SLI, an additional x16 physics card slot, dual Gigabit Ethernet with teaming, six SATA 3Gb/s ports, and ten USB 2.0 ports on the 680i.
Although NVIDIA did not originally state specific support for the upcoming 1333FSB processors on the 650i, the board manufacturers are telling us their boards will be capable of full support with an updated BIOS release unless otherwise noted. We also noticed that ASUS included EPP memory capability along with LinkBoost technology on their 650i board. These items are not officially supported by NVIDIA in their product documentation but each feature did work as advertised; these features are not available on the ECS or MSI boards.
This leads us into today's performance preview of the MSI P6N SLI Platinum. In our article today we will briefly go over the board layout and features, provide a few important performance results, and discuss our findings with the board. We will provide a further in-depth review of this product in our upcoming 680i/650i roundup. With that said, let's take a quick look at this impressive 650i solution from MSI.
The base 650i Ultra boards were expected in February but are missing in action and at this time we wonder if they will even be released. Usually we find NVIDIA based products being hard launched upon announcement day but the 650i chipset has not followed that pattern. This chipset should be the bread and butter offering in the NVIDIA Intel chipset family as it was designed to compete against the Intel P965 in the mainstream market. In our original look at the chipset we found it offered very good performance and indeed in most ways was a competitive offering to the P965.
We really liked the chipset and looked forward to seeing it and the P965 square off against each other in a myriad of configurations and price points. Sadly, it appears these scenarios will not happen in the same way that we had envisioned it after the marketing hoopla that followed the 680i launch. The 650i SLI was designed to offer dual x8 SLI operation, provide competitive platform performance to the Intel P965, and do this for a price in the $115~$165 range. We still think it can, but with the Intel P35 launching shortly, it appears that the late arrival of these 650i products is only going to further hurt NVIDIA's progress in the Intel chipset market.
NVIDIA designed the 650i SLI as their true mainstream Intel performance chipset, with the 680i targeted at the upper end performance segment and priced around $220 compared to $115 for the 650i. Details about the differences between the two chipsets can be located here. The major highlights are the 650i only supports dual x8 SLI operation, single Gigabit Ethernet, four SATA 3Gb/s ports, eight USB 2.0 ports. The 680i in contrast supports dual x16 SLI, an additional x16 physics card slot, dual Gigabit Ethernet with teaming, six SATA 3Gb/s ports, and ten USB 2.0 ports on the 680i.
Although NVIDIA did not originally state specific support for the upcoming 1333FSB processors on the 650i, the board manufacturers are telling us their boards will be capable of full support with an updated BIOS release unless otherwise noted. We also noticed that ASUS included EPP memory capability along with LinkBoost technology on their 650i board. These items are not officially supported by NVIDIA in their product documentation but each feature did work as advertised; these features are not available on the ECS or MSI boards.
This leads us into today's performance preview of the MSI P6N SLI Platinum. In our article today we will briefly go over the board layout and features, provide a few important performance results, and discuss our findings with the board. We will provide a further in-depth review of this product in our upcoming 680i/650i roundup. With that said, let's take a quick look at this impressive 650i solution from MSI.
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nicolasb - Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - link
Maybe this was mentioned in part 1 and I missed it, but how does the 650i perform in terms of heat output? And how effective/noisy is the north bridge cooling on the MSI board? And how does the overall power consumption of the system compare to P965? The 680i certainly runs very hot indeed compared to its Intel rivals;I think need to know if the 650i does the same.Gary Key - Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - link
Power consumption numbers are on page 9. Thermals are a different story as they will vary widely depending upon the case design and internal cooling. The best I can do is to setup a 650i and a P965 on a test platform and take readings without any airflow across the boards. I will do that tonight but from the touch of your finger testing, I figure the 650i is about 15% warmer on average. The fan that MSI includes has a db rating of 34 and did not sound whiny in testing.nicolasb - Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - link
I think we need to know, even.Geraldo8022 - Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - link
Yes, this is very important to me and I also would like the answers to these questions.phusg - Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - link
Guys I agree it's very important but please RTFA first ;-)From page 9 power consumption you can conclude that the 650i uses some 10-15 Watts less than the 690i.
phusg - Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - link
Additionally if idle is more important to you then the P965 seems to nose in front, if load is more important then the RD600 chipset seems to be king. Unfortunately only DFI has a board at the moment although I think ASUS is rumoured to be preparing one too.And as far as noise goes I think all these motherboards are passively cooled, so they should be pretty close to 0db.
yyrkoon - Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - link
First, let me get this out of the way:Last page second to the last paragraph, I'm assuming you meant 'knock-out blow' ?
Now that, that is out of the way, is it just me, or does it seem that MSI is/has been encroaching on ABIT, and like companies as far as stability goes ? I personaly have not owned any MSI motherboards for quite some time, but everytime I read about their boards, it seems to be getting more, and more favorable for them.
Now a question concerning functionality. Will this SIL eSATA chip handle SATA Port multipliers well ? Would be a very good option if so. Also how many PCIE lanes do these boards actually use vs the i680 boards ? I remember seeing a spec sheet of the 590 vs the 570 (which if I recall correctly, was half the PCIE lanes, 590 vs 570 that is) but I do not recall seeing any data concerning the i680 vs its little breathren.
Gary Key - Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - link
Hi,It should have been knock-out blow and is corrected now. On the front page we linked to our 680i launch article that explained the technical differences between the chipsets - http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...">680i Launch - but to answer your question quickly the 680i has 46 PCI Express Lanes and nine links compared to 18 PCI Express Lanes and four links on the 650i SLI. The specs on the SIL3531 can be found here - http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?...">SiL3531. The chipset has support for Port Multipliers with FIS-based switching such as their own SiL3726 chipset.
MSI over the last couple of years had lost their focus to some degree in the motherboard market and it seemed as though they either wanted to product low cost boards to compete against ECS/Foxconn or high-end boards in their Diamond series. You never knew what to expect from them when a new chipset was released. They were also getting a bad rap for being late to market along with getting the board finally tuned correctly about the time production ended on it. I know from several discussions with them over the past couple of months that they are aware of past issues and are vigorously working to correct those issues now. Product quality has always been good overall but has certainly become better as of late while pricing is still aggressive based upon feature sets.
Thanks for the comments.
yyrkoon - Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - link
Thanks for the reply Gary.Am I right in assuming that just because a given chipset has x mount of PCIE lanes/Links, that <insert OEM> motherboard manufactuer is not obligated in using all of these lanes /links ? IF this be the case, how would one go about finding this information out, without reverse engineering the motherboard ?
just4U - Wednesday, March 21, 2007 - link
Odd is it not? They used to be first to market in alot of boards and had to constantly fine tune after launch because they were riddled with issues. I've always liked MSI and usually purchase a few of their boards each year.