HARDOCP - Subsystem Testing, Test Systems & System Benchmarks

Date:: Friday , February 01, 2008
Author:: Morry Teitelman
Editor:: Kyle Bennett
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EVGA nForce 780i SLI

The EVGA 780i SLI packs a lot of nice features under the hood, including support for the current mainstream DDR2 memory technology, and SLI using 2 or 3 NVIDIA graphics cards. Is it enough to compete with the latest Intel DDR3 board 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 XMS2-9600 memory modules running at 800MHz 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 to listen to the Megadeth album United Abominations.

Audio playback of the selected album was flawless, with no discernible audio distortion.

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 audio pickup and clarity was much better with it on.

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 stand alone mode on the NVIDIA 780i SLI SPP controller. Testing was also conducted using an IDE drive in a primary slave configuration on the NVIDIA controller. All drive benchmarks were done using the open source Iometer program

As expected, the SATA RAID 0 array took the performance crown, with the standalone SATA drive’s performance coming in at a close second place. Both external drive configurations performed on par with one another, with no real difference performance-wise between the two. CPU utilization remained under 1% for the duration of all tests.

Network Utilization Tests

Hagel Technologies’ DU Meter software was used in conjunction with Windows Task Manager to measure the performance of the NVIDIA GigE NICs. Note that it was found that both onboard NICs performed identical to 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.

NVIDIA GigE controller

The large file transfer results came in very good, with the download average speed besting that of upload by over 14MB/s. Amazingly enough, the CPU utilization measured in at under 20% for both tests as well.

The small file transfer results were equally impressive, with the upload average speed beating that of download by 8MB/s. Again, the CPU utilization remained below 20% during all test runs.

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: