NVIDIA nForce 500: Biostar and MSI Aim for the Gold

Firewire and USB Performance

After looking at many options for Firewire and USB testing, we finally determined that an external USB 2.0, Firewire 400, and Firewire 800 hard disk would be a sensible way to look at USB and Firewire throughput. We utilize a RAM disk as our "server", since memory removes almost all overhead from the serving end. We turn off disk caching on the USB and Firewire side by setting up the drives for "quick disconnect" so our results are consistent.

We use 2GB of fast 3-3-3-8 system memory set up as a 450MB RAM disk and 1550MB of system memory. Our standard file is the SPECviewPerf install file, which measures 432,533,504 bytes (412.4961MB). After copying this file to our RAM disk, we measured the time for writing from the RAM disk to our external USB 2.0, Firewire 400, or Firewire 800 drive utilizing our internal Windows based timing program. The copy times in seconds were then converted into Megabits per second (Mb) to provide a convenient means of comparing throughput. Higher Rates therefore mean better performance in this particular test.



Possibly the most interesting finding in our Firewire and USB throughput tests is the outstanding performance of an external hard drive connected to Firewire 800. Our benchmarks show Firewire 800 is up to 42% faster than a drive connected to the more common Firewire 400, and about 14% faster than the fastest USB 2.0 solution.

NVIDIA continues to offer excellent USB 2.0 performance and we notice a slight improvement over the already class leading nForce4 results. As is the storage drive testing we see small improvements over the nForce4 board indicating the storage area really has undergone some changes that are not so minor at this time.

Ethernet Performance

The current motherboard test suite includes LAN performance measurements. All of these boards utilize PCI or PCI Express based controllers with the only difference being the supplier of the core logic.

The Windows 2000 Driver Development Kit (DDK) includes a useful LAN testing utility called NTttcp. We used the NTttcp tool to test Ethernet throughput and the CPU utilization of the various Ethernet Controllers used on the Intel motherboards.

We set up one machine as the server; in this test, an Intel system with an Intel CSA Gigabit LAN connection. Intel CSA has a reputation for providing fast throughput and is a logical choice for our Gigabit LAN server.

On the server side, we used the following Command Line as suggested by the VIA whitepaper on LAN testing:

Ntttcpr -m 4,0,‹server IP› -a 4 -l 256000 -n 30000

On the client side (the motherboard under test), we used the following Command Line:

Ntttcps -m 4,0,‹client IP› -a 4 -l 256000 -n 30000

At the conclusion of the test, we captured the throughput and CPU utilization figures from the client screen.





The CPU utilization performance of the NVIDIA boards with TCP/IP acceleration turned on is excellent with none of the AM2 NVIDIA boards having an advantage over the others until acceleration is turned off. Even with acceleration turned off these boards hold an advantage over the other offerings. On the nForce 500 chipsets, if TCP/IP acceleration is enabled then you must disable your current software based firewall for the driver to work correctly.

The throughput numbers are down slightly against the ATI AM2 and nForce4 boards but once again are very consistent with each other. We have not been able to replicate or find the data corruption issues that were reported with the nForce4 setup in our testing to date. This is very good news as NVIDIA currently offers the most extensive networking feature set in the general desktop area with the nForce 500 chipset.