What determines motherboard's ultimate I/O performance?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Bert Hyman
  • Start date Start date
B

Bert Hyman

External things being equal, is the I/O performance of a motherboard
mostly determined by the chipset, or can the maker impact performance
(intentionally or otherwise) through other circuitry?

If it's entirely or primarily the chipset, which of Intel's current
products appears to be best at SATA I/O?

If it's seriously affected by the maker's implementation, do any of
them consistenly do better than the others?
 
Bert said:
External things being equal, is the I/O performance of a motherboard
mostly determined by the chipset, or can the maker impact performance
(intentionally or otherwise) through other circuitry?

If it's entirely or primarily the chipset, which of Intel's current
products appears to be best at SATA I/O?

If it's seriously affected by the maker's implementation, do any of
them consistenly do better than the others?
Click to expand...

Here is a recent article. The charts were prepared in this case,
with what looks like a 4 drive RAID0 array.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/2007/...battle_uk/page11.html#raid_0_transferdiagrams

There are other aspects to RAID controllers, and sometimes the issues
don't show up, until something happens to the array. Over on 2cpu.com,
they have a few stories about handling large arrays, and waiting days
for a large array to rebuild. So STR is only one measure of a RAID.
How it performs when the array is busted, is important too. And very few
review articles spend the weeks necessary, to test behavior under
maintenance operations.

Of course, with a RAID0, there is no maintenance. It just breaks :-)
Then you make a new one :-)

Paul
 
External things being equal, is the I/O performance of a motherboard
mostly determined by the chipset, or can the maker impact performance
(intentionally or otherwise) through other circuitry?

If it's entirely or primarily the chipset, which of Intel's current
products appears to be best at SATA I/O?

If it's seriously affected by the maker's implementation, do any of
them consistenly do better than the others?
Click to expand...

here's another article at Tom's that addresses the history and new
heavyweight champ for chipsets.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/05...ies_chipsets_with_fsb1333_and_ddr3/index.html

What out for that virtualization layer though ;)
 
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