6Gbps SATA Performance: AMD 890GX vs. Intel X58/P55
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 25, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
The First Test: Sequential Read Speed
The C300 can break 300MB/s in sequential read performance so it’s the perfect test for 6Gbps SATA bandwidth.
Intel’s X58 is actually the best platform here, delivering over 340MB/s from the C300 itself. If anything, we’re bound by the Marvell controller or the C300 itself in this case. AMD’s 890GX follows next at 319MB/s. It’s faster than 3Gbps SATA for sure, but just not quite as fast as the Marvell controller on an Intel X58.
The most surprising is that using the Marvell controller on Intel’s P55 platform, even in a PCIe 2.0 x16 slot, only delivers 308MB/s of read bandwidth. The PCIe controller is on the CPU die and should theoretically be lower latency than anything the X58 can muster, but for whatever reason it actually delivers lower bandwidth than the off-die X58 PCIe controller. This is true regardless of whether we use Lynnfield or Clarkdale in the motherboard, or if we’re using a P55, H55 or H57 motherboard. All platform/CPU combinations result in performance right around 310MB/s - a good 30MB/s slower than the X58. Remember that this is Intel’s first on-die PCIe implementation. It’s possible that performance is lower in order to first ensure compatibility. We may see better performance out of Sandy Bridge in 2011.
Using any of the PCIe 1.0 slots delivers absolutely horrid performance. Thanks to encoding and bus overhead, the most we can get out of PCIe 1.0 slot is ~192MB/s with our setup. Intel’s X58 board has a PCIe 1.0 x4 that appears to give us better performance than any other 1.0 slot for some reason despite us only using 1 lane on it.
Using one of the x1 slots on a P55 motherboard limits us to a disappointing 163.8MB/s. In other words, there’s no benefit to even having a 6Gbps drive here. ASUS PLX implementation however fixes that right up - at 336.9MB/s it’s within earshot of Intel’s X58.
It’s also worth noting that you’re better off using your 6Gbps SSD on one of the native 3Gbps SATA ports rather than use a 6Gbps card in a PCIe 1.0 slot. Intel’s native SATA ports read at ~265MB/s - better than the Marvell controller on any PCIe 1.0 slot.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
57 Comments
View All Comments
assassin37 - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
why isnt the x-58 gigabyte native 6gbs board on the write benchmarks?blacksun1234 - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
I would like to see HD Tune & HD Tach Average Read speed with Crucial HDD for each chipset. With this benchmark, AMD SB850 can beat Marvell's solution a lot!Nickel020 - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
There's a small error on page 4, that's an X58A-UD3R you've got there, not an X58-UD3R.Also, there seem to be two different Marvell 6G controllers, the 88SE9123 and the 88SE9128, what's difference between these two?
Nickel020 - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Finished reading, very interesteing results :)I find it really strange that P55 performs so poorly, I wonder whether it also performs poorly when used with SATA 3G SSDs, seeing as I'm just about two migrate my Vertex 60GB RAID 0 from P45&ICH10R to P55.
Would be great if you could look into that as well, better storage performance would be a major reason to buy S1366 instead of S1156.
Etern205 - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
If it's possible, mind adding the Asus U3S6 to your test (in a updated article) since that card uses a PCIe x4 interface.Thank You! :)
The card
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a...&cm_...
nerdtalker - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
That's an interesting card, since it appears from the photo to incorporate the 4x PCIe 1.0 PLX controller, or essentially the same on-motherboard solution ASUS was using.That seems like a much more interesting card to test.
7Enigma - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Hi Anand,I have to admit that this particular article was a bit confusing for me. Probably because the test rigs are so similar in name I was going back and forth. My question is how does this article's results correlate to earlier boards (P45 for me in particular)? Am I understanding things correctly to assume that sticking a 6Gbps SATA card would actually be detrimental to performance in my rig if I was to get a new SSD in the coming months?
Thanks for the informative article.
semo - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Hi Anand,On the 1st page, were you comparing Vertex LE performance on 890GX vs X58 or H55? And also do you have any comments on why it's random read is slower than the random write. AFAIK this is the only SSD with such characteristics.
Thanks
Casper42 - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
I noticed the same. Text says compared to X58 but both charts on page 1 say H55.Exodite - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
With the Thuban hexa-cores and 890X/FX boards in the pipeline AMD looks better and better for my next rig. After building a 790FX/PII 965BE rig for a friend, however, I were worried by the obviously poor disk performance even in comparison to my old P35/E6600 setup with an older HDD.I appreciate being kept up to date with this development as I see disk performance as the only major drawback of the platform at this point.