Ethernet Performance
The one area where the Asus A8R-MVP was mildly disappointing was in
their choice of an Ethernet controller. Instead of using a PCIe LAN
that is capable of providing full 1 Gb bandwidth, Asus used a PCI
solution that will be limited in maximum speed by the PCI bus. The
A8R32-MVP Deluxe keeps the PCI Ethernet, but it adds a second PCIe
Ethernet controller capable of full bandwidth Gigabit LAN.
In practical terms, the PCI bus Ethernet is not much of a roadblock. It
caps out about 700 Mb/s compared to the 950Mb/s capability of a PCIe
solution. Since most broadband Ethernet connections barely tax 10Mb/s,
this will really only matter to those who do sustained high-speed
transfer of very large files over a true 1 Gb network - probably less
than 1% of users. Still, PCIe Gigabit Ethernet is always a better
solution, and it is good to see that Asus addressed this issue in the
A8R32-MVP.
The Windows 2000 Driver Development Kit (DDK) includes a useful LAN
testing utility called NTttcp. We used the NTttcp tool to test Ethernet
throughput and the CPU utilization of the various Ethernet Controllers
used on the AMD motherboards.
We set up one machine as the server; in this case, an Intel box with an
Intel CSA Gigabit LAN connection. Intel CSA has a reputation for
providing fast throughput and this seemed a reasonable choice to serve
our Gigabit LAN clients. At the server side, we used the following
Command Line as suggested by the VIA whitepaper on LAN testing:
Ntttcps -m 4 ,0,‹client IP› -a 4 -l 256000 -n 30000
On the client side (the motherboard under test), we used the following Command Line:
Ntttcpr -m 4 ,0,‹server IP› -a 4 -l 256000 -n 30000
At the conclusion of the test, we captured the throughput and CPU utilization figures from the client screen.
As you can clearly see, the PCIe Gigabit LAN on the A8R32-MVP is
capable of about 35% faster speed than the PCI Gigabit LAN used on
board. This won’t matter to most users, since high-speed internet
barely taxes a 10Mb/s connection. The speed difference may be
important, however, if you routinely transfer many large files on a
full 1 Gigabit network.

February 17, 2006
February 16, 2006
February 15, 2006