X-bit labs

EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra Mainboard Review: Meet NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra Chipset! (page 7)

Category: Mainboards

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 01/12/2005 | 05:15 AM ]

EPoX made the following use of the ten USB 2.0 ports supported by nForce4 Ultra: four ports are placed on the mainboard back panel, and the remaining six ports are implemented as three onboard pin-connectors. Unfortunately, the manufacturer doesn’t add a USB bracket for the back panel of the system case carrying High-Speed USB ports. In other words, even if you have an advanced PC case with the USB ports on the front panel, you will still hardly be able to use all the USB ports initially supported by EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra.

VIA VT6307 controller ensures the implementation of two 400Mbit/s FireWire ports present on the EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra mainboard. These ports are also laid out as onboard pin-connectors, but a FireWire bracket for the back panel of your system case comes together with the board.

We’ve already discussed the networking capabilities of the nForce4 Ultra chipset above, and they are all present in the reviewed mainboard, including Secure Networking Engine and NVIDIA Firewall 2.0.

For a practical evaluation of the integrated network controller efficiency, we carried out a brief test of the bandwidth and the CPU load during data transfer. We ran the test with the firewall enabled and disabled as well as with the hardware Secure Networking Engine on and off. The NTttcp utility from Microsoft Windows DDK was our measurement tool.

We’ve got very curious results. First of all, take note of the high effective bandwidth provided by the network controller built into nForce4 Ultra – it is close to the theoretical peak of 1000 megabits per second! The second fact to consider is that the Secure Networking Engine isn’t just a marketing advantage of the chipset, but a really useful mechanism that considerably reduces the CPU load when the computer is on a local network. The effect from the Secure Networking Engine is especially strong when you also use NVIDIA Firewall 2.0 – the CPU load is reduced by a half in that case. If the firewall is off, the SNE still reduces the CPU workload quite noticeably.

You should be aware that the SNE can only be enabled by NVIDIA’s own firewall, while third-party firewalls will still load the CPU substantially when the network traffic is intensive.

The last thing to pay attention to with respect to the EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra mainboard is RAID support. There are two Parallel ATA-133 channels and four Serial ATA ports on board that support NCQ, hot swapping and data-transfer rate of up to 3Gbit/s. All drives attached to these channels can be united into arrays of levels 0, 1, 0+1, and JBOD, irrespective of their interface. All RAID-related operations are performed on the EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra as NVIDIA had intended – the nvRAID utility works without a glitch, so we only have to measure the performance of the integrated RAID controller and compare it to a competing solution, the RAID controller from the i925/i915 chipsets (found in the ICH6R South Bridge). We tested the performance of a RAID0 array made up of two Serial ATA drives (Western Digital Raptor WD360GD) using the HDD Test suite from Futuremark PCMark04.

As you can see from the obtained results, the two channels of the RAID-controller integrated into the nForce4 Ultra positively affect the speed of simple file copying. In other cases Intel controller looks preferable, but this only proves that the buffering algorithms in Intel Application Accelerator are more efficient during ordinary use of the disk subsystem than NVIDIA’s algorithms. nForce4 Ultra potentially has every chance to become a faster solution, if the software part of the RAID implementation gets better optimized.