Sapphire PURE Innovation - ATI's Chipset for the AMD Enthusiast
by Wesley Fink on July 29, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Disk Controller Performance
With so many chipsets and brands of storage controllers on current Athlon 64 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 - 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 Sapphire PURE Innovation is a really excellent performer in iPeak tests. The new SB450 turned in some of the highest iPeak measurements that we have yet seen in IDE and on-board SATA. While the SATA controller of the SB450 is not the SATA 2 used by the NVIDIA nForce4, its performance is even faster than nF4 when running our stock SATA drive.
In past benchmarking, IDE has provided the slowest IO performance in this roundup. However, ATI IDE breaks that trend, with IDE performance to be the best that we have measured since we have been testing with iPeak.
Sapphire and ATI have also done an excellent job in implementing the Silicon Image 3132 chipset for SATA 2 performance. The 3132 was blazing fast in our benchmarks, setting new iPeak performance records. For disk storage - IDE, SATA, or SATA 2 (with the Sil3132) - the Sapphire ATI delivers outstanding storage performance.
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QueBert - Saturday, July 30, 2005 - link
I like the white, but not a big fan of red. As for it being the "first white motherboard we've seen" There was a really sweet looking one by I believe, Epox. Platinum colored PCB with blue and gold on the board. The color scheme of this Sapphire is different, and different is good. I hate green/red PCB's.beorntheold - Saturday, July 30, 2005 - link
Under Gaming Performance:"... If you keep in mind that the orange bar represents the same NVIDIA 6800 Ultra used to test the other boards in this review, you can clearly see that the Sapphire ATI is at or near the top in most game tests..."
There is either an error in the graph or in the text - because the orange bar clearly says
nV 7800 GTX.
Olaf van der Spek - Saturday, July 30, 2005 - link
> 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.What exactly is meant here?
Isn't more completed operations per second better?
Wesley Fink - Saturday, July 30, 2005 - link
I meant that the operations per second is meaningless as a SPECIFICATION of hard drive performance. Yes, more operations per second is better, but you will never see iPeak ops/sec quoted as a specification.roel - Saturday, July 30, 2005 - link
And what about support for linux?Will it boot? Will it be fast as well?
I'd like to know.
roel
kevykev - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
What is with the stupid fish names though? How ridiculous.TheInvincibleMustard - Saturday, July 30, 2005 - link
Actually, that was one of the first things to catch my eye ... Not the fish, but the jaguar, with the silkscreened logo looking almost exactly the same as the automobile company (Google Images if you're curious). The actual leaping cat is positioned slightly differently between the two, but the similarity is remarkable.If I had better image manipulation on this machine I'm at, I'd whip up a side-by-side comparison to better illustrate (hehe) my point.
shoRunner - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
All i can say is drool, this definately looks like a very promising board, if they can fix the issue with the USB transfer rates(even without a fix its will still be very competative, how often do most ppl transfer huge amounts of data over USB?). What i still want to see is one of these boards with the integrate graphics and a DVI port.Stas - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
Just as I expected: nVidia is whooped. ATi + AMD = PerformanceZebo - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
Looks great Wes..cept for memory is to close together and not staggard and may present cooling problems between the sticks...plus the board looks like green snot, much prefer blacks, reds and blues.