X-bit labs

NVIDIA nForce4 SLI (Intel Edition) Platform Review (page 10)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 04/13/2005 | 07:07 PM ]

Serial ATA Controller

Just like nForce4 for Athlon 64 processors, the new nForce4 SLI (Intel Edition) features a Parallel ATA controller supporting two ATA-133 channels and two Serial ATA-II controllers, each implementing two ports. As we have already seen by the regular nForce4, the use of several ATA controllers is very efficient when it comes to performance during active work with the storage subsystem.

Serial ATA-II controllers of nForce4 SLI (Intel Edition) support all the modern characteristics: 3Gbps port speed, NCQ and HDD hot swap. Besides that the ATA controllers of the chipset we are testing today allow building RAID arrays of the following levels: 0, 1, 0+1 and 5. Moreover, unlike competitors’ solution the new nForce4 SLI (Intel Edition) allows using hard disk drives connected to different controller and supporting different interfaces to be parts of a RAID array.

The RAID arrays built on NVIDIA nForce4 SLI (Intel Edition) based mainboard can be managed through the mainboard BIOS as well as with the help of a special MediaShield utility (it used to be known as nvRAID). MediaShield utility helps create, convert and remove RAID arrays directly from Windows. It also offers array status monitoring for the RAID arrays built in your system.

In order to evaluate how fast the Serial ATA controller of the nForce4 SLI (Intel Edition) are, we measured the performance of RAID 0 array of two Western Digital Raptor WD740GD hard disk drives. The results were then compared with the similar numbers obtained for the same array tested with mainboards on different chipsets.

First we used HDD Suite from PCMark04:

As we see, nForce4 SLI (Intel Edition) loses to Intel chipsets in all subtests except file copy. The dual-channel operation of the Serial ATA controller in NVIDIA chipset is evidently of no use against powerful buffering algorithms implemented in Intel Application Accelerator.

Although the results obtained during linear read and write speed measurements are slightly different:

As we see, nForce4 SLI (Intel Edition) Serial ATA controller can be faster than Serial ATA solutions of its competitors when the buffering algorithms do not work, i.e. during linear reading and writing.