ULi M1695 PCIe/AGP for Athlon 64 – Part 2 with SLI

Disk Controller Performance

With so many chipsets and brands of storage controllers on current Athlon 64 boards, we standardized on Anand’s storage benchmark, first described in Q2 2004 Desktop Hard Drive Comparison: WD Raptor vs the World, as a standard means of measuring disk controller performance. 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 should not be used to report hard disk performance 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 ULi is a really excellent performer in iPeak tests, with performance in league with the ATI SB450 that we recently tested in our Sapphire motherboard review. The ULi M1567 was among the highest iPeak measurements that we have yet seen in IDE and on-board SATA. While the SATA controller of the ULi 1567 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, ULi and ATI IDE break that trend, with IDE performance being the best that we have measured since we have been testing with iPeak.

There are no additional SATA/SATA2 controllers on the ULi M1695 Reference Board 2, but for IDE or SATA disk storage, the ULi M1567 delivers outstanding storage performance.