HARDOCP - Subsystem Testing, Test Systems & System Benchmarks

Date:: Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Author:: Morry Teitelman
Editor:: Kyle Bennett
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ASUS P5N-T Deluxe

Our last 780i NVIDIA nForce 780i SLI chipset review, seems to hold a lot of promise with its solid design and with the features that the NVIDIA chipset brings to the table. Just how well does this board compare with the rest of the Intel board, or even the other NVIDIA based boards?

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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 DDR2-9600 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 album was enjoyable, with no distortion detected.

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.

Unfortunately, the microphone interface appeared to be unusable with this audio chipset. No matter how the audio settings were tuned, microphone output was garbled and very distorted.

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 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 performed best out of all of the drive configuration types, with the standalone SATA drive coming in just behind it performance-wise. The 2 external devices performed similarly to one another, with the IEEE 1394 device only having a slight advantage. In all cases, the CPU utilization remained below 1% for the test duration.

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 came in as expected, with the average download speed beating that of the upload results by a little over 10 MB/s. Average CPU utilization stayed below 20% for the duration of both tests.

The small file transfer results were also within expectations, with the average upload speed besting that of download by almost 8 MB/s. The CPU utilization again remained under 20%.

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:

Graphs are labeled as follows: Motherboard - CPU Clock - Memory Type

SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth Benchmark

Note that all results above were obtained running the installed memory in Dual Channel mode.

The P5N-T Deluxe board performed well in this memory benchmark, easily matching performance with the leading Intel board. (The 790FX results with the 9700 Phenom are not correct. The score should be well over 10,000, and will be corrected moving forward.)