HARDOCP - Subsystem Testing and Benchmarks

Date:: Thursday , October 02, 2008
Author:: Morry Teitelman
Editor:: Kyle Bennett
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EVGA nForce 780i SLI FTW

With the introduction of the nForce 780i SLI FTW board, EVGA took the winning design of their nForce 780i SLI board and perfected it with better overall power circuitry and board cooling. Is this enough to make it competitive with the Intel chipset based solutions?

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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 XMS PC-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 to listen to tracks from the latest Megadeth album United Abominations.

As expected, playback of the selected tracks was without issue, with no audio distortion detected throughout the test session.

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.

Overall pickup and clarity of the recorded audio was hands down better with Microphone Boost enabled, with the audio being barely audible with it disabled. However, there was no distortion detected whatsoever in either case.

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

Unsurprisingly, the SATA based RAID 0 array performed best overall, with the standalone SATA drive not far behind it. The external drive devices performed on par with one another and within expectations for those type devices. All devices didn’t appear to stress the CPU at all while in use, with a recorded CPU Utilization below 1% 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 NICs. Note that it was found that both onboard NICs performed identically to one another. DU Meter was used to measure bandwidth, with Windows Task Manager used 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 were some of the fastest I’ve seen to this point for both download and upload operations, with the average download doubling the upload speed, coming in at over 48 MB/s. The upload speed was equally impressive at a blazing 29 MB/s. In both cases, the CPU utilization remained below 20% for the duration of both tests.

The small file transfer results were as impressive as the large file results, with the average upload speed besting that of download by almost 7 MB/s, coming in at almost 29 MB/s. Again, CPU utilization remained under 20% during both tests.

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: