 |
| Hot
Hardware's Test Systems |
| One
driven by the ol' BX and the other
by the new kid on the block, the
i815. |
|
LiteOn
Mid Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Pentium III
933EB, Abit
SE6 i815 Motherboard and Abit
BX133-RAID i440BX Motherboard, 128MB of PC133
True CAS2 SDRAM from Corsair (thanks Outside
Loop), Dual IBM 15Gig 7200 RPM ATA100 Hard
Drives (thanks again Outside
Loop), Elsa Gladiac GeForce2 GTS AGP Graphics
Card , Kenwood 72X
CDROM, Win
98SE, DirectX 7.0a
 |
| Head-to-Head
/ Performance Progression |
| Where
the rubber meets the road... BX
versus i815 |
|
Winbench
99 from Ziff Davis does a nice job of breaking
down various levels of performance in CPU, Hard
Drive System and various other aspects of each
subsystem in a given configuration. We set
up the BX133 in both ATA100 and RAID 0 Mode.
The SE6 was also paired with an ATA100 drive of
the same make and model. Each of the drives
used was partitioned and formatted but left
totally free of data. The test drive setting
within Winbench 99 was set to the empty ATA100
drives and run from identical host drives in each
system. This set up a very level playing
field for all of the tests.
(click
for viewing)
While
the CPU and FPU scores are pretty much on par, the
Hard Drive subsystem scores show the BX133-RAID
absolutely man-handling the SE6. The
Striping RAID setup on the BX133 scored THE best
drive benchmarks we have ever seen here in the lab
on any processor at any speed. Even the
single channel ATA100 scores on the High Point
Controller of the BX133, show its supremacy be far
in almost every drive benchmark when compared to
the i815 driven SE6. Intel may have some
work to do yet on their Ultra ATA100
drivers. CPU utilization was extremely low
in all configurations with the RAID 0 set up being
the lowest, surprisingly.
Since
we are looking at drive performance, let's break
it down further for you. All scores taken at
933MHz.
SiSoft
Sandra Hard Drive Benchmarks
|
Drive
Bench BX133 ATA100
|
Drive
Bench SE6 ATA100
|
|
Drive
Bench BX133 RAID O Mode
|
The SE6 stands proud versus the BX133 with a
single ATA100 drive. However, this is a
synthetic benchmark and it is very different from
a "real world" application benchmark
like Winbench 99. Sandra seems to rely
heavily on disk access times and the i815 seems
more nimble with this. However, the
BX133-RAID in RAID Mode 0, totally obliterates the
i815. That was to be expected with the RAID
set up and two fast ATA100 drives.
Let's check those
scores one more way with Hard
Drive Tach. All scores taken at 933MHz.
|
Hard
Drive Tach SE6 ATA100
|
Hard
Drive Tach BX133 ATA100
|
|
Hard
Drive Tach BX133 RAID Mode 0
| HD
Tach is showing its age and in all tests the Read
Burst Speed is pegged at 80MB/Sec. What is
more interesting is that the High Point Controller
on the BX133-RAID shows lower CPU utilization and
slightly higher performance than the i815's
integrated solution. In addition, once again
the RAID Mode 0 set up smokes the rest of the
field.
Let's
have some gaming fun with the SE6 and BX133 and
then call it a day, shall we?
Quake
3 Arena Performance and The Ratings
| |
