|
Advice Beginners BIOS Guide CPUs Links Mainboards Memory Network Storage Video/Sound Cards Contact Forum SiteMap Sponsors WebNews Home |
. | . |
|
Prices: CPU Intel P4 2.4C-800 P4 2.6C-800 P4 2.8C-800 P4 3.0-800 P4 3.2-800 AMD AthlonXP XP 1700+ XP 2000+ XP 2400+ XP 2500+ XP 2700+ XP 3000+ XP 3200+ Athlon64 Athlon64 3200+ Athlon64 FX-51 Opteron Opteron 240 Opteron 242 Opteron 244 Opteron 246 Memory Corsair Crucial Kingston Mushkin OCZ |
LOSTCIRCUITS |
|
|
| Shuttle AK37GTR ATX 2.03 Power for a lot of memory | ||
| (Review by MS, October 25, 2002) |
HDD performance
Probably the most important factor for overall system performance is the HDD performance. We were looking at both the standard VIA controller and the HighPoint HPT372 controller, the latter particularly since we were interested in the performance of the Marvell Bridge chips and Serial ATA 150. In the original AK37GTR we were unable to get more than 15 MB transfer rates from the Seagate Barracuda SATA-V, we had similar experiences with another board featuring the same configuration. As it turns out, however, the low performance is not an issue with hardware / drive firmware per se, rather, it may relate to BIOS tuning.
Don't let these numbers fool you, Windows2000 without Service Pack2 limits HDD burst transfers to around 60 MB/sec.
This changes immediately with the installation of SP2. Everything else is identical. We know that this is almost trivial but there are still people who deny any benefits of SP2 on HDD performance in Win2K.
The HDTach performance of the prototype Barracuda limps a bit behind what we got with the Promise SATA controller which is conceivable since the Marvell approach constitutes a bridge solution and not a pure SATA interface. There will be higher performance in future revisions of controllers and drives / updated firmware revisions.
next page: => gaming performance =>