Sapphire PURE Innovation - ATI's Chipset for the AMD Enthusiast
by Wesley Fink on July 29, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Firewire and USB Performance
It is really difficult to put together a simple, repeatable, and consistent test to measure USB and Firewire Performance. Since our goal was to make this a standard part of motherboard testing, we needed a benchmark that was reasonably simple to run that would also provide consistent results on the same test bed. We finally determined that an external USB 2.0, Firewire 400, and Firewire 800 hard disk might 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 just 1GB of fast 2-2-2 system memory set up as a 450MB RAM disk and 550MB of system memory. Our stock file was the SPECviewPerf install file, which is 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 or 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.
Sapphire PURE Innovation uses the commonly available and good-performing VIA Firewire 400 chip. Firewire 800 is 40 to 55% faster than a drive connected to Firewire 400, but it is still rare to find Firewire 800 integrated into motherboards.
Perhaps the biggest surprise in our testing was the poor performance of USB 2.0 on the Sapphire ATI. ATI had promised improvement in USB performance in the SB450 compared to the earlier SB400, but we could see little improvement in our USB 2.0 tests. ATI has responded that our USB 2.0 tests measure sustained throughput, which is relevant in USB operations only with applications like the USB 2.0 hard drive that we use for this test. ATI states that "burst" USB 2.0 throughput has been improved in the SB450 to near the same levels of competitive USB 2.0 peak performance. Perhaps even more important, ATI say that they are aware of the issues with USB 2.0 performance and these will be fully corrected - sustained and peak performance - in the SB600 south bridge.
Since our ramdisk/apptimer File Copy is measuring sustained throughput, we also compared performance of ATI IDE/SATA/Sil SATA2 using this same test procedure. The performance of ATI IDE remains excellent, but SATA and SATA 2 performance are very competitive, yet not standout as in the iPeak storage benchmarks of the same controllers. This lends some credibility to ATI's comments that their USB 2.0 performance is competitive when burst performance is measured.
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Avalon - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
This board sounds fantastic!Hacp - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
Competative with similar Nforce4 boards(DFI LP) isn't enough. They need to beat the price by 5-10 dollars in order to regain the edge. I agree that the VTT options is awesome (for you BH-5 users), but in order to kill the current proven top Overclockers board, they need to be very competative with the DFI in terms of price.Also, I was wondering if they managed to fix the cold boot issue with these boards. If the cold boot issue is a non issue with these boards, and they are priced exactly the same as the DFI Lan Party boards, then it is a no brainer for BH-5/CH-5/UTT users as to which board to pick (unless they already are doing the 3.3 Rail Vdimm mod).
Also, the 2nd page, He art in the first sentence needs to be fixed, and in the first page, it says AMD in the first paragraph when its supposed to say ATI.
afrost - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
I don't think so, a lot of people complain about problems with the DFI.....and it has a super loud fan on the chipset which is difficult to replace because the video card is right on top of it.I personally would never buy a DFI....different people obviously have different priorities
If this board is rock solid stable like AT reported, then they will have a winner.
cryptonomicon - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
looks like a strong competitor, and here was a typo pg. 11"The Sapphire ATI chipset performs at least as fast as the best of nForcee4 chipset boards"
Mant - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
I think that was intentional. They're comparing the ATI to the "NForcee" by MVidia...like you can compare a Seiko watch to a BOLEXRyanVM - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
In the first pic of the motherboard, it clearly has 8 SATA ports. However, the next page lists the specs with 6 SATA ports and the next picture seems to confirm that. Is there indeed an 8 SATA port version as well?Wesley Fink - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
The pictures on page 4 were provided by Sapphire and are earlier prototypes. The actual production version we tested is pictured on page 5 and has 6 (not 8) SATA ports. We apologize for the confusion. There are indeed pads for 8 SATA ports on the production board, so there could be further developments.ncage - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
What i like:Performance in general
good audio quality (im wondering if it supports any of the eax extensions though which would be great if it did. Would elimante the need for a sound card.)
What i don't like:
bad USB2 performance. This would affect me big time. I have a pro consumer camera (8MP Olympus C-8080) and i usually transfer a bunch of images at a time from my camera to my computer so this is definitly a disapointment.
I really like nvidia as a company. Their driver team has from the start been top notch. I think that is one of the things that led to their popularity. I generally have always gone with nvidia except in the 9800 pro days because you know why. I currently own a 6600gt which i love. Anyways the only thing that upset me that nvidia did was to take out soundstorm out of thier chipsets. I hope ATI bringing high end audio will force nvidia to reconsider. Nvidia knew that a lot of customers were asking for soundstorm back yet they still wouldn't put it back in. I just don't understand this.
I hope thier are boards produced that don't have dual video card abilites because of price. I really don't want two video cards. I only occasional play games and im not going to spend 500-900 on two video cards. So we shall see how this plays out.
bob661 - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
The mobo manufacturers were griping about the price. Also, I believe the demand was too low. Yes I know lots of geeks liked it but we're a small percentage of the market.BPB - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
"Today, we look more deeply at production version of the ATI Grouper that will be launched by Sapphire next week."So, when do we actually see these? If it's by end of Summer, great. If not, it may just be too late. I think most people who've waited for ATI to get this out have already gone to nVidia. I know my buddy has.
Also, regarding Crossfire, can an AIW X800XT PCIe work with a plain old X800XT PICe?