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LOSTCIRCUITS	SHORTCUTS: Distributed Computing Crossfire - SLI RX200 Chipset Overview At One Glance What You Get Layout VRM On-Board Peripherals BIOS Test Configuration / Debugging Memory, Audio, USB, RAID DOOM3 3DMark'05 Canyon Flight FarCry and 5.12 Drivers Quake4 F.E.A.R. Call Of Duty2 Final Words Comment on this review on the LC Forums
Sapphire Pure Crossfire A9RD480 There was something we meant to say .. but we forgot
(Review by MS, Dec 22 2005)

Memory Bandwidth

With the integration of the memory controller on the CPU, at least in theory, the board and chipset should not matter too much when if comes to overall memory bandwith. Yet, there are the BIOS settings and aside fro the user accessible options, there are a number of other timing parameters that can slow down or speed up the system a bit. Naturally, there are also the issues of the actual bus speed and whether Spread Spectrum Modulation is enabled and so on and so forth. Everything accessible set to equal values, we still see a difference between the Crossfire and the SLI platform with the latter taking a minor but noticeable lead.

Crossfire in Red vs. SLI in Green; Top columns: Integer bandwidth, bottom columns: FPU bandwidth.

Audio Performance

Instead of benchmarks, we are using subjective listening experience: Overall, background noise was largely non-existent, in fact, even with the unforgiving Zaman Theatre6 it was almost impossible to pick up any stray noises. The 3D audio decoding is one of the best we have experienced so far on the level of on-board audio. In summary, the integrated sound deserves a top grade.

USB Performance

Everybody is talking about the USB performance of the SB450 SouthBridge but how good or bad is it really? We used a Seagate 100GB Seadisc to look into the actual transfer rates - again, in a direct comparison between the Crossfire and the NF4- SLI board.

   

Left, Crossfire transfer rates, right nForce4 transfers using the same drive

We don't know what exactly is going on here, the Crossfire numbers are still acceptable but way below our expectations. There is always a potential issue with the specific board at hand or else some compatibility problems in this case specific to the SeaDisc, in other words, these results are not necessarily set in stone.

SiI 3132 RAID Performance

The SiI 3132 controller is a second generation SATA RAID controller with support for synchronous transfers and Command Queuing and has the reputation of being one of the best controllers in the business.

   

We were using two Fujitsu 2.5" MHT2060BH drives to check the performance of the SiliconImage RAID controller. In other systems, these drives work admirably well, with burst transfers of over 100 MB/sec and sustained OD read performance in the order of roughly 30 MB/sec per drive. For Example, on the NF4 Pro chipset, we managed to get approximately 600 MB/sec burst rates and 180 MB/sec sequential reads in a RAID0 +6 configuration. This would translate into some 200 MB/sec burst transfers in the test setup, alas, we only saw roughly 25% of that. In short, on the Sapphire PC-A9RD480 board, we appear to have stumbled across another compatibility issue, in that the SiI controller interfacing does not seem to like those drives. To summarize, the Host Transfer Rate appeared to be severely limited capping the overall drive performance.

In HDTach 3.0, we saw similar results. The Silicon Image 3114 controller integrated on the South Bridge worked just fine with the Barracuda SATA V. We had extensive discussions with Sapphire technical support who informed us that with, for example. WD Raptors, they were seeing up to 250 MB/sec burst transfers on the SiI 3132 controller, so we may be looking at an anomaly of this specific board sample or else, another compatibility issue.