NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra: Biostar's Performance Surprise
by Gary Key on February 16, 2006 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Firewire and USB Performance
After looking at many options for Firewire and USB testing, we finally determined that an external USB 2.0, Firewire 400, and Firewire 800 hard disk would be a sensible way to look at USB and Firewire throughput.
Our first efforts at testing with an IDE or SATA drive as the "server" yielded very inconsistent results, since Windows XP sets up cache schemes to improve performance. Finally, we decided to try a RAM disk as our "server", since memory removed almost all overhead from the serving end. We also managed to turn off disk caching on the USB and Firewire side by setting up the drives for "quick disconnect" and our results were then consistent over many test runs.
We used 1GB of fast 3-2-2-8 system memory set up as a 450MB RAM disk and 550MB of system memory. Our standard file is the SPECviewPerf install file, which measures 432,533,504 bytes (412.4961MB). After copying this file to our RAM disk, we measured the time for writing from the RAM disk to our external USB 2.0, Firewire 400, or Firewire 800 drive using a Windows timing program written for AnandTech by our own Jason Clark. The copy times in seconds were then converted into Megabits per second (Mb) to provide a convenient means of comparing throughput. Higher Rates therefore mean better performance in this particular test.
The Biostar TForce4 U 775 board does not offer a Firewire option. The USB 2.0 performance is consistent with other NVIDIA based boards and continues to lead the Intel chipset solutions in throughput.
After looking at many options for Firewire and USB testing, we finally determined that an external USB 2.0, Firewire 400, and Firewire 800 hard disk would be a sensible way to look at USB and Firewire throughput.
Our first efforts at testing with an IDE or SATA drive as the "server" yielded very inconsistent results, since Windows XP sets up cache schemes to improve performance. Finally, we decided to try a RAM disk as our "server", since memory removed almost all overhead from the serving end. We also managed to turn off disk caching on the USB and Firewire side by setting up the drives for "quick disconnect" and our results were then consistent over many test runs.
We used 1GB of fast 3-2-2-8 system memory set up as a 450MB RAM disk and 550MB of system memory. Our standard file is the SPECviewPerf install file, which measures 432,533,504 bytes (412.4961MB). After copying this file to our RAM disk, we measured the time for writing from the RAM disk to our external USB 2.0, Firewire 400, or Firewire 800 drive using a Windows timing program written for AnandTech by our own Jason Clark. The copy times in seconds were then converted into Megabits per second (Mb) to provide a convenient means of comparing throughput. Higher Rates therefore mean better performance in this particular test.
The Biostar TForce4 U 775 board does not offer a Firewire option. The USB 2.0 performance is consistent with other NVIDIA based boards and continues to lead the Intel chipset solutions in throughput.
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jamesbond007 - Thursday, February 16, 2006 - link
Haha! Way to go, Gary. You have a fan base! =PGary Key - Thursday, February 16, 2006 - link
Thanks for kind words everyone. I will post a short update to this article in a couple of days as the new bios results are looking promising in resolving some overclock and bios lockup issues.drewintheav - Thursday, February 16, 2006 - link
Gary is awesome! :)Zebo - Thursday, February 16, 2006 - link
I love Gary can't we get him writing articles people will read? Intel/biostar - common.. you'll get 1000 page hits max and 3/4 of them are because Gary wrote it!:PGooger - Thursday, February 16, 2006 - link
Not too bad if you want a P4, but for me I am avoiding nVIDIA Chipsets except when it comes to AMD products. Go Go ULi!DigitalFreak - Thursday, February 16, 2006 - link
Uh, you mean Go Go Nvidia, since they own ULi now...Googer - Thursday, February 16, 2006 - link
Finaly Intel Gets Hypertransport on their chips, like it or not HTT probably is becoming a standard that Intel might have to adopt sooner or later.DigitalFreak - Thursday, February 16, 2006 - link
This has nothing to do with Intel. Nvidia uses HT to communicate between their north and south bridges. They've done it with all their Intel chipsets so far.Googer - Thursday, February 16, 2006 - link
Since the noth bridge has HTT, in theory you could connect an nVIDIA based nFORCE north bridge to a ULi or nVIDIA AMD north bridge and have one of several things:1) A dual CPU system- One Intel Pentium M/4 and One AMD 64 CPU running on the same motherboard simultaniously. The OS might need to be re-written so that multi-threaded applications only use one processor. Linux prehaps?
2) AMD 64 Could get Quad Channel RAM higher.
3) You could ADD a ULi M1567 Southbridge to get True AGP with that PCI-express SLI.
4) You could possibly mix and match chipsets. VIA K8T8xx with one of AMD's north/south bridges and an nFORCE Intel Editon.
You could possibly Connect the AMD 64 Directly (using it's own HTT link) in to the the P4 north bridge with no need to use the chipset designed for the A64.
HTT on Intel means a whole new world of possibilites!
Furen - Thursday, February 16, 2006 - link
Huh? How is Intel getting hypertransport on its chips? HT is a standard but I dont think Intel will ever adopt it because of its pride, more than anything else. It truly doesn't matter though, since HT is just a data transport and using any other data transport gives you the same results as long as it is used in a similar configuration.