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| AMD Athlon64 3200+ - ASUS K8V Deluxe The Middle Grounds | |
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(Review by MS, November 3, 2003) |
| K8V Deluxe At: |
I/O Performance
The K8V features two on-board SATA RAID controllers, that is, the integrated VT8237 controller with built-in SATA RAID functionality and the Promise PDC20378 Controller based on the Promise PDC20375 with the additional integrated Marvell SATA bridge silicon. One thing about the Promise controller is the presence of integrated buffers that make it impossible to obtain correct burst readings in benchmarks like HDTach, in that case, what is measured is the burst speed between the controller and the PCI interface, which is beyond the measuring capabilities of HDTach. Suffice it to say that the Promise controller is not a native SATA solution and, therefore, has twice the command overhead of a true SATA solution. This, in turn, will limit the I/O performance of the controller and become overt mostly in situations of small transfer blocks - a typical situation in office applications.
VIA states that the VT8237 is a native SATA solution, therefore, we would expect I/O performance or, by extension, WinBench99 Disk Winmark scores to be substantially increased over those of the Promise Controller. For comparison, we are using a SiliconImage PB3112A PCI SATA adapter card in the same system.
WinBench99 2.0 DiskWinmark
SiliconImage PCI controller: blue; Promise controller: red, VIA controller: grey; Tranfers in kB/sec, higher is better.
The Business, AVS Express and Microstation results are I/O dependent, and the SiliconImage PCI card literally blows away the competition. Photoshop, Premiere, SoundForge, and Visual C++ depend on reads AND writes and, therefore, favor the Promise controller. Keep in mind that the Seagate drives are currently the only native SATA drives in the market. The Frontpage98 results are scaled down by a factor of 10 to adjust to the rest of the graph but since the results are beyond the theoretical limitations of any interface, we show them for the record only without taking them into further consideration. Take home message of this graph is that neither SATA interface included on the K8V comes anywhere near the state of the art with the Promise controller being a rather superior solution compared to the VIA controller.
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