Performance

For performance testing, I did run the SLI Plus through a few of our basic benchmarks but those were all just to confirm that everything worked well and there were no glaring differences. The actual performance between boards doesn’t really change now that everything is integrated into Intel’s chipsets. That said, the SLI Plus performed well when paired with the i7-7700 and the RX480 though in Deus Ex you would want to drop the settings down slightly to smooth out those framerates. My main concern was really with the network performance because this is one area that not everyone is running the same configuration. The Intel i219V NIC that the SLI Plus has is fairly standard, though. It did perform really well against the Gigabyte board with its combination of the same Intel i219V and a Killer NIC. This goes to show that there are variances in network performance as well depending on network load.

Like I said before, with the all black and silver board the SLI Plus isn’t really designed to be a new flashy gaming board at all. It does however still have some lighting. When it is running and assuming you didn’t turn it off in the software, it has white LEDS in all four corners of the board that gives it a little backlighting. This white lighting fits the simple design of the board really well. You can’t control individual zones, though, so remember if you don’t like it you will need to turn them all off.