Disk Testing

The results in IDE testing were generated from a WD1200 hard drive. Burst rate is slightly higher on the nForce board. Average transfer rate remains the same across all configurations. Processor usage is nominal and results are well within the margin of error.

SATA results were generated from a Seagate Barracude V drive. Similar results as what was seen with the IDE drive. Testing was also done on the nForce 4 / Corsair combo and the ABIT 925XE on a 74GB WD Raptor - burst rates were over 125 MB/s on both platforms and the average transfer rate jumps to 65MB/s with only minimal differences recorded. Clearly, in single drive configurations, both the ICH6R and NVIDIA's MCP are highly capable.

Sound Testing

Even 32 Direct 2D streams have a very low overhead with the Azalia powered solution on the ABIT board barely registering a blip on the radar. There is a fairly big difference between the nForce/Corsair and nForce/OCZ combo.

Azalia flexes some muscle over the AC97 solution on the NVIDIA MCP here. Again, the nForce/OCZ combo lags behind fairly heavily with the only difference being the different memory modules used.

It looks like EAX requires a bit of processing that Azalia does not handle as well in hardware. The nForce/Corsair combo takes the lead and the nForce/OCZ still rounds up the rear.

The 925XE loses the advantages when other things are going on. A whopping 26% difference seperates the nForce/Corsair combo from the 925XE when EAX2 is enabled.