X-bit labs

Chipsets for Socket AM2 Platform: ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 and Nvidia nForce 590 SLI (page 13)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 06/13/2006 | 10:44 AM ]

Serial ATA 2.0 Controller Performance

Now let’s move from general performance tests to more interesting discussion of various chipset subsystems. This is where we could really see the difference between ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 and Nvidia nForce 590 SLI.

We tested the Serial ATA 2.0 controller integrated into the chipsets by connecting one of the today’s fastest hard drives, WD Raptor X (WD1500AHFD) to the tested mainboards. Although this HDD doesn’t support 3Gbit/s data transfer speed, it is a way better than most HDDs out there in terms of all other parameters. Thus, Raptor X supports NCQ, features a 16MB buffer and boasts unprecedented spindle rotation speed for a Serial ATA hard drive – 10,000rpm. We tested the controller with a popular PCMark05 testing suite.

The obtained results demonstrate certain advantage of the Serial ATA controller built into the Nvidia nForce 590 SLI. It can be actually explained by the more advanced driver that caches all typical operations thus ensuring the above mentioned advantage. This supposition is also backed up by the fact that in case the operation is more sensitive to sequential data transfer rate, Nvidia’s controller loses its superiority.

So, we have every reason to state that the SATA controller of the new Nvidia nForce 500 chipset family is more advanced than the solution introduced in the new chipsets from ATI not only from the formal standpoint. For some reason we encountered driver issues that wouldn’t let us test the SATA controller of ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 chipset in the RAID mode. The RAID array we created on ATI Sturgeon mainboard from the RAID page of the BIOS Setup wasn’t recognized by the Windows drivers for some reason. Therefore, we do not have any comparison of RAID arrays performance to offer you this time.