HARDOCP - Subsystem Testing and Benchmarks

Date:: Thursday , August 07, 2008
Author:: Morry Teitelman
Editor:: Kyle Bennett
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Intel DX48BT2 Motherboard

Intel’s own motherboard answer to its X48 chipset, the DX48BT2, holds a lot of promise. From its sleek looks to its feature rich design, is this board is lining up to be a serious choice for those wanting to go an unbeaten enthusiast path?

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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 Crucial Ballistix DDR3-2000 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 to listen to the latest release from Nine Inch Nails The Slip.

Audio playback of the selected album was distortion free, and enjoyable in a way that only NIN can provide.

Audio – Microphone Port Testing

The MIC-IN input was tested using 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 audio related distortion was detected with or without Microphone Boost enabled, overall audibility was much better with Microphone Boost enabled. Without it on, you could barely hear anything coming over the microphone.

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 Southbridge controller. Testing was also conducted using an IDE drive in a primary slave configuration on the Marvell controller. All drive benchmarks were done using the open source Iometer program

While the SATA RAID 0 based array did take the overall performance crown, the standalone SATA device remained closer than expected throughout the tests. Both external devices performed almost identically, with one glitch during the run. For whatever reason, the USB 2.0 device reported as having a 0% CPU utilization value. In all other cases, CPU utilization remained well below 1%.

Network Utilization Tests

Hagel Technologies’ DU Meter software was used in conjunction with Windows Task Manager to measure the performance of the Intel 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.

Intel GigE LAN controller

The large file transfer results were within expectations, with the average download speed going strong at a 40 MB/s average. The average upload speed trailed that of download by almost 24 MB/s, coming in at 16 MB/s. In both cases, CPU utilization did not break 20%.

Again, the results came in as expected, with the average download and upload speeds remaining about equal to one another at just over 16 MB/s. The CPU utilization did not go over 20% yet again.

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

SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth Benchmark

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

While the DX48BT2 board performed on par with the other DDR3 based boards, there remains little difference between its memory performance and that of the DDR2 based solutions. Notice also that the memory performance gap between the Intel and AMD solutions is slowly fading away.