Asus P5W64-WS Professional Motherboard
Next we'll look at more relative data- points perhaps with PCMark05's HDD test suite which measures things like application load time, Windows start-up and other common disk workloads.
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Just as a reminder on the graph nomenclature below, we ran the ARC-1210 RAID card in different slots on the motherboard, to look at performance over a X8 or X4 PCI Express connection. Scores labeled with "X4 SB" were taken with the card in the third slot which is enabled with a X4 PCIe link off the Southbridge in the 975X chipset. Scores labeled with "X8 Switch" were taken in the forth slot with a X8 PCI Express connection driven from the IDT PCI Express switch on this motherboard.
The ICH7R proves to be the fastest solution for Windows XP startup, at least as far as this test is concerned but by a very slim margin, and oddly enough the PCIe X4 configuration for the Areca RAID card is second fastest. Beyond that, things scale very similarly to our HDTach tests, when it comes to "general usage" performance with PCMark's HDD test. Finally, application load time performance (reminder these tests are measure in MB/sec) is tightly grouped between the various configurations, again with the exception of the ICH7R RAID 5 performance.
