HARDOCP - Subsystem Tests, Test Systems and Benchmarks

Date:: Friday , September 21, 2007
Author:: Morry Teitelman
Editor:: Kyle Bennett
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abit IP35 Pro

abit shows off their design prowess with the IP35 Pro. Featuring the latest Intel chipset, this board appears to have a lot of performance potential. Just how well does it stand up to the competition though...

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Subsystem Testing

NOTE: For all Subsystem Testing, an Intel LGA 775 E6300 Core2 Duo CPU with a 1066MHz FSB and 2 x 1GB Corsair DDR2 XMS2-10000 memory modules running at 1066MHz were used in testing.

Audio – Subjective Listening

One of the easiest ways to determine the quality of the audio subsystem is via a subjective sound test. Ideally, a sound test requires audio covering the entire spectrum, from subtle to intense. For this test, I chose the various audio tracks from the Smashing Pumpkins album Zeitgeist.

Audio playback of the selected album was enjoyable, with no distortion detected at all during the experience.

Audio – Microphone Port Testing

The MIC-IN input was tested using both our standard Labtec Desk Mic 524 testing microphone. Spoken words were recorded and played back using Microsoft Sound Recorder, with the Microphone Boost option disabled and enabled. The Microphone Boost option is found within the Advanced menu under the Microphone section within the Volume Control menu.

While no distortion was detected with or without microphone boost enabled, overall pickup and playback volume was much better with microphone boost enabled.

Drive Performance

To adequately test the capabilities of the on board USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394 connections, we chose to use an ACOMDATA HD060U2FE-72-USB 2.0/FireWire HDD connected to both ports. SATA and IDE drive tests were performed using Maxtor 40Gb ATA 133 model 6E040L0 hard drives on the IDE headers and Samsung 40GB SATA II hard drives on the SATA headers. The SATA drives were used for testing in a RAID 0 16k block size configuration and in standalone mode on the Intel ICH9R controller only. Testing was conducted using an IDE drive in a primary slave configuration with the JMicron controller only. All drive benchmarks were done using the open source Iometer program

As expected, the SATA RAID 0 array had the best overall performance, while the single SATA driver in standalone came in at a close second place. The IDE and external drive devices performed as expected, with the IEEE 1394 device having a slight performance advantage over the USB 2.0 device. In all cases however, the CPU utilization remained well under 1% while the tests ran.

Network Utilization Tests

Hagel Technologies’ DU Meter software was used in conjunction with Windows Task Manager to measure the performance of the Realtek GigE NICs. It was found in testing that both Realtek controllers performed on par with one another. DU meter was used to measure bandwidth, with Windows Task Manager to monitor the CPU utilization on the test system. For the test itself, a 750MB archive file containing various sized .WMA audio files for the large file transfer test and a 750MB worth of various sized .WMA audio files for the small files transfer test were used in conjunction with an integrated Gigabit NIC on the host system and a crossover cable to connect the host system to the test system. A crossover cable was used to rule out any possible bandwidth losses due to hub or switch passage.

Realtek GigE controller

The large file transfer results fell as expected, with a 9 MB/s transfer speed advantage witnessed during download operations. The CPU utilization remained at around an impressive 20% during both tests as well.

With a similar performance spread, the small file transfer results favored the upload transfer by 9 MB/s. Yet again, the CPU utilization remained under 20% for the tests duration.

Test Systems

The following system configurations were used for the Sandra memory benchmark graph, as well as all graphs listed under the Application and Gaming Benchmarks sections: