LAN Testing

Ethernet throughput with the onboard GbE connection on the nForce 4 boards have been very good. The DFI nF4 Boards (Ultra and SLI have even managed to break the 1 Gbps barrier in our lab. The reference board here does not seem to be as well tuned but puts up a very respectable 960 Mbps. In contrast the ABIT 925XE comes in surprisingly low, lower than some PCI GbE interfaces we've seen. On a Gigabyte 925X we got much better results.

Although the network testing was done with the Firewall and ActiveArmor on, processor usage still seemed to be on the high side. During reviews of nForce 4 boards on the AMD side we noticed processor usage was high there also and we managed to track down a bug with NVIDIA where ActiveArmor was not offloading connections properly. It was supposed to have been resolved (details here) but due to a few complications we have not got everything working completely smoothly yet. We did get in touch with NVIDIA regarding our results here and this should be addressed in the next few days.

Just to clear things up, testing was initially done on the nForce board with the OCZ memory and because of the suspected bug, testing was not repeated with the OCZ memory installed hence the identical results.

USB Throughput

Some interesting results with the USB2 testing - there is practically no overhead with the nForce 4 / Corsair combo but that changes quickly when switching over to the OCZ. The 925XE plants itself firmly between the two. Throughput is consistent on all three hardware combinations.