NVIDIA nForce 500: Biostar and MSI Aim for the Gold

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 and ATI SB450 based SATA controllers providing the a 7% improvement in I/O operations over the NVIDIA SATA controllers. We do see upwards of a 3% performance improvement in the nForce 500 over the nForce4 in our tests. The ULi and ATI IDE controller logic generate particularly excellent results, scoring higher than the NVIDIA SATA controller in the Content Creation test. We did not include the SB600 results as a direct comparison is not available for these test results due to a hard drive change during testing.