X-bit labs

DFI LanParty UT RDX200 CF-DR Mainboard on ATI Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire Chipset (page 12)

Category: Mainboards

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 01/20/2006 | 07:14 PM ]

Performance

USB 2.0

As we have already pointed out in our reviews, the implementation of the USB 2.0 interface is a weakness of the ATI South Bridges. To double-check it we measured the bandwidth of the USB bus and the CPU utilization during data transfer along this bus to and from the USB 2.0 Maxtor OneTouch 250GB hard disk drive.

The obtained results are far from positive for the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire chipset in general and the DFI LanParty UT RDX200 CF-DR mainboard in particular. USB 2.0 bus of this mainboard turned out almost twice as slow as the bus by the competing product on the chipset from NVIDIA nForce4 family. Here I can only add that the slow operation is not the only drawback of the USB 2.0 bus of our DFI LanParty UT RDX200 CF-DR mainboard. It also loads the CPU a lot during work. In other words, USB 2.0 bus is a weak spot of our today’s hero.