6Gbps SATA Performance: AMD 890GX vs. Intel X58/P55
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 25, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Random Read Performance is Also Affected
It’s not all about peak bandwidth either. Remember that bandwidth and latency are related, so it’s not all too surprising that the setups that delivered the least amount of bandwidth, also hurt small file read speed.
The target here is around 80MB/s. That’s what Intel’s X58 can do off one of its native 3Gbps SATA ports. Let’s see how everything else fares:
At 80MB/s the Crucial RealSSD C300 is pushing roughly 20,000 IOPS in this test. The highest random read speed of any MLC SSD we’ve ever tested in fact. With the 890GX the C300 can only manage 64.3MB/s.
Naturally I shared my data with AMD before publishing, including my Iometer test scripts. Running on its internal 890GX test platform, AMD was able to achieve a 4KB random read speed of 102.6MB/s in this test - faster than anything I’d ever tested. Unfortunately that appears to be using AMD’s own internal reference board and not one of the publicly available 890GX platforms. The good news is that if AMD’s numbers are accurate, there is hope for 890GX’s SATA performance. It’s just a matter of getting the 3rd party boards up to speed (AMD has since shared some more results with me that show performance with some beta BIOSes on 3rd party boards improving even more).
Using the Marvell 6Gbps controller in any PCIe 2.0 slot (or off a PCIe 2.0 interface as is the case with Gigabyte’s X58), or in one of ASUS’ 6Gbps ports behind the PLX switch, yields peak performance more or less.
Any of the PCIe 1.0 slots however saw a drop from ~80MB/s to ~65MB/s. The exception being Intel’s odd x4 slot that is a PCIe 1.0 slot, but branches off the X58 IOH and thus appears to offer lower latency than PCIe 1.0 slots dangling off the ICH.
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assassin37 - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
why isnt the x-58 gigabyte native 6gbs board on the write benchmarks?blacksun1234 - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
I would like to see HD Tune & HD Tach Average Read speed with Crucial HDD for each chipset. With this benchmark, AMD SB850 can beat Marvell's solution a lot!Nickel020 - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
There's a small error on page 4, that's an X58A-UD3R you've got there, not an X58-UD3R.Also, there seem to be two different Marvell 6G controllers, the 88SE9123 and the 88SE9128, what's difference between these two?
Nickel020 - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Finished reading, very interesteing results :)I find it really strange that P55 performs so poorly, I wonder whether it also performs poorly when used with SATA 3G SSDs, seeing as I'm just about two migrate my Vertex 60GB RAID 0 from P45&ICH10R to P55.
Would be great if you could look into that as well, better storage performance would be a major reason to buy S1366 instead of S1156.
Etern205 - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
If it's possible, mind adding the Asus U3S6 to your test (in a updated article) since that card uses a PCIe x4 interface.Thank You! :)
The card
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a...&cm_...
nerdtalker - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
That's an interesting card, since it appears from the photo to incorporate the 4x PCIe 1.0 PLX controller, or essentially the same on-motherboard solution ASUS was using.That seems like a much more interesting card to test.
7Enigma - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Hi Anand,I have to admit that this particular article was a bit confusing for me. Probably because the test rigs are so similar in name I was going back and forth. My question is how does this article's results correlate to earlier boards (P45 for me in particular)? Am I understanding things correctly to assume that sticking a 6Gbps SATA card would actually be detrimental to performance in my rig if I was to get a new SSD in the coming months?
Thanks for the informative article.
semo - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Hi Anand,On the 1st page, were you comparing Vertex LE performance on 890GX vs X58 or H55? And also do you have any comments on why it's random read is slower than the random write. AFAIK this is the only SSD with such characteristics.
Thanks
Casper42 - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
I noticed the same. Text says compared to X58 but both charts on page 1 say H55.Exodite - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
With the Thuban hexa-cores and 890X/FX boards in the pipeline AMD looks better and better for my next rig. After building a 790FX/PII 965BE rig for a friend, however, I were worried by the obviously poor disk performance even in comparison to my old P35/E6600 setup with an older HDD.I appreciate being kept up to date with this development as I see disk performance as the only major drawback of the platform at this point.