Intel Core Duo: AOpen i975Xa-YDG to the Rescue
by Gary Key on May 4, 2006 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Disk Controller Performance
The AnandTech iPeak test is 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 our raw files that are 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 I/O operations that took place during a single run of Business Winstone 2004 and MCC Winstone 2004. To try to isolate performance differences to the controllers that we were testing, we used the Maxtor MaXLine III 7L300S0 300GB 7200 RPM SATA drive in all tests. 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 I/O operation. In order to make the data more understandable, we report the scores as an average number of I/O 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 I/O operations completed in a second. However, the scores are useful for comparing "pure" performance of the storage controllers in this case.
The performance patterns hold steady across both Multimedia Content I/O and Business I/O, with the ULi based SATA controller providing the a 12% improvement in I/O operations over the Intel and JMicron SATA controllers. The ULi IDE controller logic continues to be one of the best IDE solutions, posting scores that are higher than the Intel SATA controller and over 13% better than the Intel and ITE IDE controller.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
81 Comments
View All Comments
JarredWalton - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Why did someone mod this post down? I'm serious: if you put an H in brackets, the AT comments engine interprets that as "turn on white text". No insult was intended towards HardOCP; I'm merely pointing out that Frumious' post turned the text white, unintentionally. Thanks for the negative mod points.... :|Frumious1 - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Anyone else getting white text? What's up with that?Test:
[/font]
[/link]
Did that help?
goinginstyle - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
At least the quote was a bit different this time but still not needed. I thought the article was great and actually one of the best ones I have read lately. It was nice to finally see two like platforms compared against each other with the same cpu speeds and components although AMD2 would have been good to see.You really should do more of these comparisons as the reviewing one motherboard against another in the same product family gets boring. You never see much of a variance in the scores so the only question is if it sucks or not. At least this way you review the board and compare it against something you might be thinking about buying if you are a Intel or AMD user. You honestly get to see what works best for you. It was nice to see additional real application benchmarks instead of the same old winstone that or 3dmark this.
I was disappointed in not seeing any Photoshop benchmarks or something that has to do with graphics, it would round out your audio and video benchmarks nicely. Anyway, keep up the good work and hopefully you can do this same type of article when Conroe gets here against the AMD products.
In the meantime props to Intel for finally showing some performance improvement without needing a nuclear powerplant for the CPU.
goinginstyle - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Any numbers yet?goinginstyle - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
....and temperature readings???Gary Key - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
We pulled the charts, the AOpen board uses a thermal sensor instead of the on-chip diode so our numbers are off. Once we decide what number to utilize, these numbers will be posted. If you refer to our Yonah Preview article, the power consumption numbers are listed for the 945GM board. I posted a couple of numbers earlier in this thread with the AOpen board. Thanks....goinginstyle - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Thank you for the update and hopefully we can see these numbers soon.BigLan - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
"The rear panel contains the standard PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, parallel port, LAN port, and 4 USB ports."Looking at the picture, I don't see a parallel port there and it's not listed on the specs either. Did you mean a firewire port?
Also, how useful is the external sata connector? Does the board come with a cable to utilise the power connector?
Gary Key - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Sorry about that, yes, it was suppose to be Firewire. I had it corrected on my final draft and missed it twice in the edits.AOpen ships an excellent cable that has the drive and power port plugs together. I found the external connector to be very useful during testing on the JMicron chipset. Since I really enjoy HTPC tinkering, it will be of great usefulness for attaching or swapping large PVR drives out without entering the system. The JMicron chipset performed very well in our testing and had no issues handling Seagate's new 750GB drive.
BigLan - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Thanks for the reply. Any chance you need an independent review doing on that 750GB drive ;)