The ECS NFORCE 570 SLIT-A ver 5.0 is the 2nd NV based board we tested here at OCW. Based on the NF 570 SLI Intel edition + MCP 430 south bridge, SLI is supported out of the box. There is no need to rely on unsupported solutions to get SLI to run properly on this board.

Setting up this board is pretty easy. The SATA ports are spread out and DIMM slots are coloured for easy installation. I would find that the SLI slots would have been put further apart and SLIed using a longer SLI bridge. This will definitely help in  reducing the hot air around the two cards.

In terms of performance, we can see that it is on par with the big boys. In fact, we see that in most of the benchmarks done, the ECS NFORCE 570 SLIT-A does perform slightly better than the Intel 975x, 965P and other boards in 3D performance. The NV 570 SLI chipset also seems to perform better in disk performance. When it comes to real data crunching like ray tracing and multithreaded tests, the Intel chipsets are still formiddable and are better in performance.

Features wise, this board comes with no peddle card for you to switch between SLI or non SLI mode. Unfortunately, both PCIe slots remains at PCIe x8 whether you use SLI or non SLI. This is by ECS design. I have raised this issue to ECS and they said that the impact isn't noticable. We tested it and found by pairing up the 7900GT, running at PCIe x16 or PCIe x 8 has minimum difference in results. Personally, I would still prefer a full functioning PCIe x16 when only one card is used.

The board has some overclocking features with adjustments of the CLK, ASync settings, ram timing adjustments, voltage adjustments to CPU and DIMM. You can check the gallery for more details. Although we are using a ES, the BIOS has the multiplier locked,  we can o/c the board to 300MHz FSB x 11. Setting to a lower multiplier didn't help us to go beyond 300MHz. One thing we like about the async setting is that no matter how you change the CLK, the RAM can be FIXed at your selected RAM by manual selection. 1T cmd is available and it is advisable to use a high vdimm voltage for that.

Overall, this might a board for consideration for NV fans that would like to run official SLI on the mainboard. As for the overclocking options, we hope that it might just be a problem of the BIOS that is deterring us to achieve high clks.

This board should be available worldwide very soon. We would expect it to be similar to the ver 3 of this board.

*Pricing in other parts of the world might be different.