ATI’s Crossfire: Best Overclocker on the Market?
by Wesley Fink on September 27, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
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 does not represent a hard disk performance parameter 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.
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 does not represent a hard disk performance parameter 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.
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Starcraftfreak - Friday, September 30, 2005 - link
So you are saying, the Board supports the dividers for DDR500 also on a Revision C core? I can remember when you published an article explaining it's a new feature of Revision E. Please clarify.SLI - Wednesday, September 28, 2005 - link
Everything I have seen thus far on the ATI chipset points to the FSB dropping to DDR333 *IF* you populate all 4 DIMM slots (with DDR400 RAM) This was an issue at the CPU level with AMD Athalon on board memory controller (at first) but has been addressed with the newer steppings. VIA and Nvidia chipsets have support for DDR400 with all 4 slots populated. This is a very important aspect to me and it needs to be addressed.Wesley Fink - Wednesday, September 28, 2005 - link
It was addressed in tRAS and Memory Stress Tests in the review - p.5. We had no trouble with 4 dimms at DDR400, though we did have to drop to 2T with 4 dimms as we do on every other AMD chipset. This is more a function of the on-CPU memory controller.sxr7171 - Wednesday, September 28, 2005 - link
I don't get it. We switched to SATA to get worse performance? SATA performed worse than IDE in every single benchmark.Scarceas - Tuesday, September 27, 2005 - link
I'd like to know what happens when you try two 6800s in a crossfire motherboard...I'm also curious about what happens why you try crossfire graphics cards on an NF4 SLI motherboard...
Early on I heard rumors that the motherboard implementation would be similar between the two and that mixing motherboard/graphics manufacturers *might* be possible...
Now the hardware is showing up and no one has tried it?
vailr - Tuesday, September 27, 2005 - link
Check: page 11 "Ethernet Performance" has format errors:http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...">http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...
Copied & pasted:
It will almost always be <em>much</em> lower than what we have measured.<br /> <br /> </span> </div> <div class="adcontainer"></div> <table border="0" width="100%"> <tr> <td align="right" colspan="2"> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tr> <td><strong><a href="showdoc.aspx?i=2542&p=12" class="smalllink">Audio
tanekaha - Wednesday, September 28, 2005 - link
Ethernet page has same problem as b4 hereI`m using firefox latest beta and the browser considers the page done after this line.
Ntttcpr - m 4,0,
I guess u use a template for these reviews I had exactly the same prob with ( and commented similarly ) with I think the asrock dual article.
I guess not many others are getting this prob but I`m glad 2 see some! else has a prob and not just me.
What browser are u using ?
Wesley have u tried 2 view the article with firefox beta ? or even firefox ?
Wesley Fink - Thursday, September 29, 2005 - link
Articles are created in a document engine by our Web Editor, from basic information layouts we send the Web Editor. The engine generates HTML code. We don't individually generate the code for articles. Any problems with viewing the pages should be emailed to our webmaster Jason.Clark@anandtech.comtanekaha - Thursday, September 29, 2005 - link
Thanks for the replies gentsI am not using any blockers or extentions .. apart from FF default pop up blocker.
I will mail jason with the facts (as I see them)
I`ll also send the info to the FF team
THX again
tanekaha
JarredWalton - Wednesday, September 28, 2005 - link
If you're using any extensions to block ads or other content, you might want to try disabling those. I've been using Firefox for over a year now, and I don't have any issues with the pages. (Some pages render improperly the first time and I need to hit refresh, but that's generally only on long pages, and it seems more of a FF bug than anything.)