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| Sapphire Pure Crossfire AM2RD580 SLI under CrossFire | |
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(Review by MS, October 8, 2007) |
ATA Performance
We used an older Seagate Barracuda SATA V for some high-level testing of transfer rates on the SB600 as well as a pair of Fujitsu MHT2060BH notebook drives in striped configuration for performance evaluation of the SiI 3132 controller. In both cases, the results were essentially limited by the drives. In this case, we really don't concern ourselves with sequential reads or writes, the only factors that matter are the buffered read and write transfers and the entires testing only serves the purpose of verifying that things are actually working. Needless to say that different benchmarks yield slightly different results. For example HDTach3.0 showed 140 MB/sec burst transfers on the RAID configuration, whereas SiSoft Sandra only measured 90 MB/sec on "Buffered Reads". On "Buffered Writes", however, Sandra also showed 140 MB/sec transfers. Granted that Reads are more important for everyday performance than Writes, in a Benchmarking Scenario, Writes more accurately reflect the capabilities of the controller since Reads are influenced among other things by cache management algorithms and generally of the firmware of the drives than by the interface itself.
USB Performance
Arguably the weakest point of ATI's older SB450 southbridge was the USB 2.0 performance. The SB600 solves the problems and delivers the performance expected by a modern controller.
SB600 (Sapphire - left) vs. nForce4 (DFI Lan Party UT UltraD SLI - right)
One thing to keep in mind is that the theoretical performance of 480 Mbit/sec is really, er, theoretical only. In reality, command overhead will limit the effective transfer rates to something in the order of 30 MB/sec on a good day. However, bottom line here is that the USB performance - using the same Seagate 100 GB Seadisc is getting close to the USB performance of nVidia's controller.
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