nForce4 SLI Roundup: Painful and Rewarding
by Wesley Fink on February 28, 2005 7:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Disk Controller Performance
With so many storage controllers on the nForce4 SLI boards, we needed a means of comparing performance of the wide variety of controllers. The logical choice was Anand's storage benchmark first described in Q2 2004 Desktop Hard Drive Comparison: WD Raptor vs the World. To refresh your memory, the iPeak test was designed to measure "pure" hard disk performance, and in this case, we kept the hard drive as consistent as possible while varying the hard drive controller. The idea is to measure the performance of a hard drive controller with a consistent hard drive. We played back Anand's raw files that recorded I/O operations when running a real world benchmark - in this case, the entire Winstone 2004 suite. Intel's IPEAK utility was then used to play back the trace of all the IO operations that take place during a single run of Business Winstone 2004 and MCC Winstone 2004. To try to isolate performance difference to the controllers that we were testing, we used Seagate 7200.7 model SATA and IDE hard drives for all tests.iPeak gives a mean service time in milliseconds; in other words, the average time that each drive took to fulfill each IO operation. In order to make the data more understandable, we report the scores as an average number of IO operations per second so that higher scores translate into better performance. This number is meaningless as far as hard disk performance is concerned as it is just the number of IO operations completed in a second. However, the scores are useful for comparing "pure" performance of the storage controllers in this case.
The Silicon Image 3114 controller is only a bit slower in MM Content IO, but it is quite a bit slower in Business IO. The 3114 does uniquely feature RAID 3 capabilities and it is featured on 3 of the 4 SLI boards: the Asus, DFI, and Gigabyte.
IDE provided the slowest IO performance in this roundup, demonstrating that SATA controllers are finally starting to show a performance edge - at least in IO operations.
We plan to also include IDE RAID and SATA RAID benchmarks in our future motherboard tests, and comparing RAID performance on various controllers will definitely be a part of future motherboard tests.
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TigerFlash - Monday, July 4, 2005 - link
I thought this link would be rather important to see:http://forum.msi.com.tw/index.php?topic=82427.0
TigerFlash - Monday, July 4, 2005 - link
NightCrawler - Thursday, May 5, 2005 - link
You make a big deal out of the fact that the DFI can hit 318 but they both do the same 2.8 ghz, users won't see much difference, if any.Asus: Maximum OC:
(Standard Ratio) 234x12 (Auto HT, 2-3-3-7, 1T, 2.8V)
2808MHz (+17%)
Maximum FSB:
(Lower Ratio) 255x11 (2805MHz) (4X HT, 2.5-3-3-7, 2.7V)
(1:1 Memory, 1T, 2 DIMMs in DC mode)
(+28% Bus Overclock)
DFI: Maximum OC:
(Standard Ratio) 238x12 (Auto HT, 2-3-2-7, 1T, 2.9V)
2856MHz (+19%)
Maximum FSB:
(Lower Ratio) 318x9 (2862MHz) (Auto HT, 2.5-4-3-7, 2.9V)
(1:1 Memory, 1T, 2 DIMMs in DC mode)
(+59% Bus Overclock)
DeanO - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
Don't know if anyone's noticed yet, but I just took a trip over to MSI's website, and guess what? Only the SLI mobo has the Creative chip. The Neo4 (i.e. nF4 Ultra chipset) mobo uses the Realtek ALC850. I for one was disappointed...That makes for an interesting decision: the SLI board is still cheaper than the Ultra board plus a Creative 24-bit sound card. Hmmm...
phusg - Friday, March 4, 2005 - link
New PCI card with C-Media DDL chip: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s=&a... ge=20&pagenumber=1Currently only available via ebay apparantly:
http://search.ebay.com/HDA-Digital-X-Mystique-7-1-...
If it has the same performance as Soundstorm remains to be seen. Reading the thread the EAX support is just as dodgy as it was on Soundstorm.
ElFenix - Thursday, March 3, 2005 - link
What chipsets did your USB and firewire drives have?thanks for the great review!
bjorn44 - Thursday, March 3, 2005 - link
Anyone know how they did the memory benchmark with memtest86 3.2? I can't find any option for testing bandwidth.Thanks,
Bjorn
giz02 - Wednesday, March 2, 2005 - link
Well if it's any consolation, PCSTATS have updated thier site review of the MSI Neo4 Plat SLI (and will probably make two more updates to it)- now states 96Khz
- will modify DICE statement
- they are indicating that the sil3132 can do raid5, but I'm not sure that it can...
Wow Roomraider, that's quite the system you have there.
Roomraider - Wednesday, March 2, 2005 - link
#82 u r absolutely correct sir. I have the top SB card available(Audigy 4 Pro)& the only way i get DTS or Dolby Digital of any form is SPDIF out Via Coax or Fiber optic cable with settings for (Passthrough) to my Yamaha 7.1 Amp.MOBO Gigabyte Ga-K8NXP-SLI
CPU AMD Athlon 64 FX-55
Cooler Gigabyte 3D CoolBlue Ultra Gt
PSU Thermaltake Purepower 650 Watt
MEMORY 4xCorsair 512Mb 3200XMS PRO Tracer Ram/Dual channel 2-2-2-5
Video 2xBFG 6800GT OC PCIE W/Serials in order
HDD 2xWD-74 GB Raptor HDD/Raid(0)configged
2xMaxtor 300 GB SATA HDD
OPTICAL 2xPlextor PX716SA-SATA 16xDual Layer+-DVDRW-48xCDR
CASE Lian-Li P60 W/clear side panel
MODS 4 Blu 80mm/1 Blu 92mm(roof/exh)& 4 Blu Cold Cathode Lite Strips
MONITOR Sony SDM-P234 23" 1920x1200 native
SOUND Creative Audigy-4 Pro,YamahaDSP-A3090 7.1ch amp/Boston Micro90 spks/Bose AM-5 W/Sub
ADD-ON MSI TV@nywhere Personal Cinema FX5200 TV/FM tuner
Tatunkhamon - Wednesday, March 2, 2005 - link
I admit this is slightly OT, but as I first got excited about the possible DD-encoding feature on the MSI-mobo and then let down by the obvious lack of it, I was happy to find these news:http://news.designtechnica.com/article6709.html
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000683034067/
I know many of us don't like the DRM/HDCP-features of HDMI, but HDMI certainly is the way to transmit high-definition, multichannel audio *without the need* to compress ie. encode to DD. And live content, such as games, would not probably have the copyprotection flags on, anyway. Of course, getting enough coverage for HDMI in both h/w and s/w will take time, but I bet this is the way it's ment to be played in the near future.
For example, think about combining this with s/w generated mc-audio and Intel HDA. No need for badly implemented codec/DAC in this model. Of this combined with discreete graphics card and the audio generated with the help of vector processing on the card.. I just hope Intel/Nvidia/ATI/whoever would start a strong enough, open standard to compete with EAX. Then Creative would either have to run, fast, or join their forces.
Meanwhile, because there is not much HDMI-support (except for the earlier, non- multichannel-high-def-audio-supported HDMI-standard, for mainly graphics) some solution providing DD-encoding to be sent over standard S/PDIF would still be very, very desired for many of us.
I end this thread-hijacking attempt here and apologize if being OT. Now back to our regular programming... :)
Wbr, Tatu