ECS NF650iSLIT-A

BIOS:

The ECS NF650iSLIT-A had shipped with a Phoenix Award BIOS, and like past ECS motherboards, it had contained a limited number of overclocking options. Voltage options were available for the CPU core, CPU FSB, memory, and nForce SPP. While the CPU voltage can be pushed up to 1.6V, the DDR2 memory can only be pushed up to 2.20V. The PC Health Status page only monitors the system temperature, CPU temperature, system fan speed, CPU fan speed, CPU vCore, and VDIMM. The PC Health Status page does not monitor the +3.33, +5.00, or +12.00V rails.

Performance:

Like the ASUS P5N-E SLI motherboard that was reviewed here yesterday, the ECS NF650iSLIT-A also had no problems with Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn, Fedora 7 Test 4, BeleniX, Solaris Express Build 63, and KateOS 3.6 Beta. This is really great to see. The ECS NF650iSLIT-A and ASUS P5N-E SLI are just two of the NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI motherboards we have tested here internally, and we have found this Chipset to perform very well with Linux. With the P5N-E SLI review being published yesterday, you can click here to see the ECS and ASUS motherboards compared under Ubuntu 7.04 with a number of gaming and desktop benchmarks.

Conclusion:

In our comparison of the P5N-E SLI and NF650iSLIT-A motherboards, the results were close but the ASUS motherboard had taken a lead in a majority of the benchmarks. However, both of these nForce 650i SLI motherboards have reliable Linux support. With the ECS NF650iSLIT-A containing limited overclocking capabilities and nothing to separate it from the rest of the 650i budget motherboards, this $120 USD motherboard isn't anything worth salivating over but could be ideal in an alternative gaming system or bargain desktop computer.