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I/O Testing

Three different drives from three different manufacturers are used in our HD I/O tests so scores are relative between boards, not between drive interfaces.

IDE HDTach

There is very little variation in IDE drive scores. The small variations in the Burst Rate and the processor usage can be simply chalked up to testing ambiguity.

SATA HDTach

Average read rate remains the same between all the drives but there is definitely some variation with the Burst rate - the difference between the fastest controller and the slowest more than 7%. Both the Gigabyte boards and both the DFI boards seem to perform similiarly and DFI seems to have their implementation tweaked a bit better.

USB2 Throughput

USB2 throughput on the nForce 4 boards is consistent if nothing else. The K8T890 implementation does come out on top by a fair margin though. It looks like there are some occasional hiccups as the processor usage did vary a bit between the four boards.

LAN Testing**

Processor usage for the GbE connection provided by the nForce 4 MCP is around the 35% range - this is not correct as with the ActiveArmor, the processor usage here should be in the 20% range. We cover the issue in more detail here and after a couple weeks of sleuth work and a lot of phone calls NVIDIA has resolved the issue. We are still waiting for updated drivers to test this but CeBIT has been complicating things a bit.

Throughput as measured by NTTTCP is amazing on the nF4 boards - they actually break the 1Gbps barrier. The Gigabyte boards are no slouches but they do not manage to keep up. The VIA K8T890 solution trails behind significantly. The second GbE controller is a PCI Marvell based unit. Hampered by the PCI bus, throughput is only roughly 751 Mbps while processor usage was a bit lower at around the 33% mark.