USB Performance
USB has been a problem area for the ATI SB450 chipset, but it has not
been a major issue with the ULi M1575 southbridge. To test performance
of USB on the A8R32-MVP, we ran our standard USB throughput test using
an external USB hard drive.
Our test method uses a RAM disk as our “server”, since memory removes
almost all overhead from the serving end. We also turn off disk caching
on the USB and Firewire side by setting up the drives for “quick
disconnect”. Our results are then consistent over many test runs.
We use just 1GB of fast 2-2-2 system memory, set up as a 450MB RAM disk
and 550MB of system memory. Our stock file is the SPECviewPerf 8.01
install file, which is 432,533,504 bytes (412.4961MB). After copying
this file to our RAM disk, we measure the time for writing from the RAM
disk to our external USB 2.0 or Firewire 400 or Firewire 800 drive
using a Windows timing program written for AnandTech by our own Jason
Clark. The copy times, in seconds, are then converted into Megabits per
second (Mb) to provide a convenient means of comparing throughput.
Higher Rates therefore mean better performance.
The A8R32-MVP Deluxe performed virtually the same in USB tests as we
have measured in other recent tests of the ULi M1575. While USB
performance is a bit slower than NVIDIA, it is definitely competitive
with the NVIDIA results, with throughput about double the ATI SB450.
This big improvement is the reason why Asus, MSI, Abit, and soon DFI
are using ULi M1575 instead. This will likely change after the
introduction of the updated ATI SB600, which is expected to arrive
around June of this year.
In addition to competitive USB performance, the M1575 also provides the
SATA2 ports missing from the ATI SB450. The ULi SATA2 also supports
RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5, and JBOD.
Disk Controller Performance
The AnandTech iPeak test was designed to measure "pure" hard disk
performance using the Intel iPeak benchmark. The hard drive is kept as
consistent as possible while varying the hard drive controller. The
idea is to measure the performance of a hard drive controller with a
consistent hard drive.
We played back Anand's raw files that recorded I/O operations when
running a real world benchmark - the entire Winstone 2004 suite.
Intel's iPEAK utility was then used to play back the trace file of all
IO operations that took place during a single run of Business Winstone
2004 and MCC Winstone 2004. The drive was formatted before each
test run and a composite average of 5 tests on each controller
interface was tabulated in order to ensure consistency in the benchmark.
iPeak gives a mean service time in milliseconds; in other words, the
average time that each drive took to fulfill each IO operation. In
order to make the data more understandable, we report the scores as an
average number of IO operations per second so that higher scores
translate into better performance. This number is meaningless as far as
hard disk performance is concerned as it is just the number of IO
operations completed in a second. However, the scores are useful for
comparing "pure" performance of the storage controllers in this case.
The regular ATI SB450 is a very good performer compared to NVIDIA
solutions, even though it is only regular SATA instead of the SATA2
supported by NVIDIA. We found the ULi M1575 to be an outstanding
performer in our earlier tests and the Asus A8R32-MVP performed at
levels consistent with our earlier test s of the M1575.

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