Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe: First ATI RD580

USB Performance

USB has been a problem area for the ATI SB450 chipset, but it has not been a major issue with the ULi M1575 southbridge. To test performance of USB on the A8R32-MVP, we ran our standard USB throughput test using an external USB hard drive.

Our test method uses a RAM disk as our “server”, since memory removes almost all overhead from the serving end. We also turn off disk caching on the USB and Firewire side by setting up the drives for “quick disconnect”. Our results are then consistent over many test runs.

We use just 1GB of fast 2-2-2 system memory, set up as a 450MB RAM disk and 550MB of system memory. Our stock file is the SPECviewPerf 8.01 install file, which is 432,533,504 bytes (412.4961MB). After copying this file to our RAM disk, we measure the time for writing from the RAM disk to our external USB 2.0 or Firewire 400 or Firewire 800 drive using a Windows timing program written for AnandTech by our own Jason Clark. The copy times, in seconds, are then converted into Megabits per second (Mb) to provide a convenient means of comparing throughput. Higher Rates therefore mean better performance.

The A8R32-MVP Deluxe performed virtually the same in USB tests as we have measured in other recent tests of the ULi M1575. While USB performance is a bit slower than NVIDIA, it is definitely competitive with the NVIDIA results, with throughput about double the ATI SB450. This big improvement is the reason why Asus, MSI, Abit, and soon DFI are using ULi M1575 instead. This will likely change after the introduction of the updated ATI SB600, which is expected to arrive around June of this year.

In addition to competitive USB performance, the M1575 also provides the SATA2 ports missing from the ATI SB450. The ULi SATA2 also supports RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5, and JBOD.

Disk Controller Performance

The AnandTech iPeak test was designed to measure "pure" hard disk performance using the Intel iPeak benchmark. The hard drive is kept 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 - the entire Winstone 2004 suite. Intel's iPEAK utility was then used to play back the trace file of all IO operations that took place during a single run of Business Winstone 2004 and MCC Winstone 2004.  The drive was formatted before each test run and a composite average of 5 tests on each controller interface was tabulated in order to ensure consistency in the benchmark.

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 regular ATI SB450 is a very good performer compared to NVIDIA solutions, even though it is only regular SATA instead of the SATA2 supported by NVIDIA. We found the ULi M1575 to be an outstanding performer in our earlier tests and the Asus A8R32-MVP performed at levels consistent with our earlier test s of the M1575.