Test Setup

Standard Test Bed Playback of iPEAK Trace Files and Test Application Results
Processor	Intel QX6700 - 2.66GHz Quad Core
Motherboard	DFI Infinity 965-S
RAM	2 x 1GB OCZ Reaper PC2-9200 Settings - DDR2-800 - 3-4-3-9
OS Hard Drive	1 x Western Digital WD1500 Raptor - 150GB
System Platform Drivers	Intel 8.1.1.1010 Intel Matrix RAID 6.2.1.1002
Video Card	1 x MSI 8800GTX
Video Drivers	NVIDIA ForceWare 158.19
Optical Drive	Plextor PX-760A, Plextor PX-B900A
Cooling	Tuniq 120
Power Supply	Corsair HX620
Case	Cooler Master CM Stacker 830
Operating System	Windows XP Professional SP2

We are utilizing an Intel QX6700 quad core CPU to ensure we are not CPU limited in our testing. A 2GB memory configuration is standard in our XP test bed as most enthusiasts are currently purchasing this amount of RAM. Our choice of high-range OCZ Reaper PC2-9200 memory offers a very wide range of memory settings with timings of 3-4-3-9 used for our benchmark results.

Our test bed now includes a water-cooled MSI 8800 GTX video card to ensure our game tests are not completely GPU bound and to reduce noise/heat levels. Our video tests are run at 1280x1024 for this article at High Quality settings. All of our tests are run in an enclosed case with a dual optical/hard drive setup to reflect a moderately loaded system platform. Windows XP SP2 is fully updated and we load a clean drive image for each system to keep driver conflicts to a minimum.

The drive is formatted before each test run and five tests are completed on each drive in order to ensure consistency in the benchmark results. The two high and low scores are removed with the remaining score representing our reported result. We utilize the Intel ICH8R SATA ports along with the latest Intel Matrix Storage driver to ensure consistency in our playback results when utilizing NCQ, TCQ, or RAID settings.


Our test drive today will be the Samsung SpinPoint T166 500GB that we recently reviewed. We implemented AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) in the BIOS to properly test the hot swap capabilities of this drive enclosure when utilizing the eSATA interface. Without the proper matrix storage driver support and AHCI implementation, hot swapping was not possible with our test bed.