X-bit labs

Chipsets for Socket AM2 Platform: ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 and Nvidia nForce 590 SLI (page 15)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

Network Controller Performance

ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 chipset doesn’t have its own network controller. ATI followed into Intel’s footsteps and suggests that the manufacturers should use external PCI Express x1 gigabit network controllers. The most popular solution here is Marvell Yukon. Therefore, we are going to compare the performance of the integrated Nvidia nForce 500 gigabit network controller against Marvell Yukon used on ATI Sturgeon mainboard. To measure the performance we resorted to NTttcp utility from Microsoft Windows NT DDK.

This test session didn’t reveal any surprising results. The performance of the gigabit network controller integrated into Nvidia nForce 590 SLI chipset is almost identical to that of the Marvell Yukon controller on ATI Sturgeon mainboard.

By the way, it is really interesting to see that the CPU utilization on Nvidia based platform using special hardware resources for efficient TCP/IP packets processing is nearly as high as in case of an external controller. It proves beautifully pure marketing origin of a lot of wonderful technologies of the Nvidia nForce 500 chipset family, doesn’t it?