![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Wednesday, April 09, 2008
- Author:
- Morry Teitelman
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
MSI P7N SLI Platinum
While the MSI P7N SLI Platinum is squarely marketed as a budget board, its heart beats like that of a champion. Just how well can this nForce 750i SLI based board compete against its seemingly more powerful Intel brethren?
Subsystem Testing
NOTE: For all Subsystem Testing, an Intel LGA 775 E8500 Core2 Duo CPU with a 1333MHz FSB and 2 x 1GB Corsair DDR2-8888 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 Smashing Pumpkins album Zeitgeist.
I found the audio playback to be most enjoyable, with no detected distortion whatsoever.
Audio – Microphone Port Testing
The MIC-IN input was tested using the 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.
Both with and without Microphone Boost enabled, there was no detectable audio distortion in the audio feed from the attached microphone. However, overall audibility and pickup was better with the option 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 NVIDIA Southbridge 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 based devices performed best overall with the SATA RAID 0 array taking the performance crown. The external device tests were even almost across the board, with the exception of the CPU utilization. For reasons unknown, the CPU utilization seen during the testing of the USB 2.0 device was significantly higher than that of the IEEE 1394 device. However, the CPU utilization did remain below 2% in all cases.
Network Utilization Tests
Hagel Technologies’ DU Meter software was used in conjunction with Windows Task Manager to measure the performance of the NVIDIA GigE NIC. 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 are a bit of mystery, given the gulf between the download and upload performance numbers. The average download speed was strong at over 40 MB/s, while the average upload speed barely broke a less than stellar 15 MB/s. However, in both cases, the average CPU utilization remained at or below an impressive 10%.
The small file transfer results were underwhelming, with the average upload speed coming in just under 15 MB/s besting that of download by almost 5 MB/s. As seen before, the CPU utilization never crossed the 10% mark.
Test Systems
The following system configurations were used for the system benchmark graphs, as well as all graphs listed under the Application and Gaming Benchmarks sections:
Graphs are labeled as follows: Motherboard - CPU Clock - Memory Type
Being this is a “budget” motherboard, we are doing our benchmarks a bit different. We are using a “low cost” E8500 CPU and DDR2-800MHz RAM and comparing the systems to some very high-end setups. These are not “fair” benchmarks, but were done in order show you just how a budget build can stack up.
SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth Benchmark
Note that all results above were obtained running the installed memory in Dual Channel mode.
The P7N SLI Platinum pulled a dead last place among the Intel boards but expectedly so. Shown here it is up against DDR3-1333 to 1800 and DDR2-1066 to 1200 systems using faster system busses. All considered, 6.84GB/sec of memory bandwidth is hardly “narrow” as we see it.
SiSoft Sandra CPU Operation Benchmark
Here we see our E8500 at stock 3.1GHz speeds pitted against out Quad Core monster QX9770. This CPU benchmark does invoke all cores. You will notice that the E8500 stills bests AMD’s flagship Athlon dual core and does not pull up far behind the quad core Phenom 9700.
Super PI Mod v1.5 Benchmark
In this synthetic benchmark, which utilizes a single core, we see our E8500 at 3.1GHz come in very close to our QX9770 at 3.2GHz as it should being the cores on the Intel processors are the same design.
wPrime
This synthetic benchmark is threaded for 4 cores in the way we use it here at HardOCP, but it can be configured differently. The E8500 has two cores, while the QX9770 has four, and thusly we see the expected 2X time to do the same CPU-centric workload.
More than anything, the results we are seeing with these synthetic benchmakrs are showing us exactly what they should and the system is working perfectly in our estimation.