![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Thursday , May 08, 2003
- Author:
- Morry Teitelman
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
ASUS P4C800 Deluxe
ASUS’ i875P based board looks to be a worthy contender as it has some nice features, but will it do what we enthusiast want it to do. And that is be a worthy Pentium 4 2.4C mate.
Subsystem Testing
Audio – CPU Utilization
The audio subsystem is among the most critical subsystems present on the motherboard. A well designed audio subsystem can add that little something extra to a well rounded board, while a poor subsystem can drag the rest of the board down. By measuring the audio subsystem’s CPU utilization under a variety of situations, you can easily determine the subsystem’s quality. A well designed audio subsystem should have minimal impact on the CPU while operating, thus freeing up the precious CPU cycles for other tasks such as graphical scene rendering. In order to best measure the real world CPU utilization of the audio subsystem, we use Ziff Davis’ Audio Winbench.
According to the benchmark results, ASUS did a good job in selecting the ADI based chip for the audio subsystem. In all tests, the CPU utilization stayed below 5%, with the utilization topping 6% in some cases. These results are not bad, but point to the fact that using the onboard audio solution could impact the system under heavy stress situations like gaming at high resolutions.
Audio – Subjective Listening
Measuring CPU utilization is a good way to determine the theoretical quality of an implement audio subsystem, but the true proof of quality comes from subjective testing of the subsystem. To test the subsystem subjectively, I chose Tool’s album Lateralus. This album in particular has an extreme mix of hard hitting audio intensity that would stress out even the best audio setup. I also used a custom benchmarking script based on the Unreal Tournament 2003 CPU and Inferno demos developed by our own Brent Justice to test the sound under 'real' game type scenarios. The benchmark tool runs through three loops of each demo, one with sound disabled, one with regular sound, and the last with EAX sound enabled.
The sound quality from the board while playing the audio CD was good across the high and low sound spectrum. I detected no hissing, crackling, or skipping during the sound test, and overall enjoyed the audio experience unique to that Tool album.
The results from the UT2k3 based benchmark were impressive to say the least. I detected no hissing, crackling, or skipping while either demo ran, with the sound itself coming through the speakers very crisp and clear. Furthermore, with the EAX sound enabled and the Inferno demo running with High Quality settings enabled, there was no loss of FPS compared to the results with sound disabled. ASUS did a masterful job in selecting the ADI audio solution for the board.
USB 2.0 / IEEE 1394
In order to adequately test the capabilities of the on board USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394 connections, we chose to use an ACOMDATA HD060U2FE-72-USB 2.0/FireWire HDD connected first to the USB port and after to the IEEE 1394 port in conjunction with TCD Labs’ HDTach program.
As is typical with this test, the results are a bit disappointing given the maximum theoretical bandwidth of both connection methods. Under both connection methods, the RAT time was typical for an external device, coming in a bit below 20ms. The USB 2.0 connection could not hold a candle to the IEEE 1394 connection during the read tests, with a gap of approximately 10k MB/s. However, both connection types had similar results during the write tests. The true performance was the CPU utilization, in which the IEEE 1394 connection scored less than 1% while the USB 2.0 connection could barely keep it below 20% while in use.
IDE/ATA Performance
System performance relies very heavily on three major subsystems, the CPU, the system memory, and the system IDE interfaces. In order to test the IDE performance of this board, I used TCD Labs’ HDTach program. My test bench currently uses Maxtor 40Gb ATA 133 model 6E040L0 hard drives on the IDE headers. On the SATA headers, I have Seagate 80 Gb Barracuda SATA hard drives installed in the test bench. Multiple SATA and IDE drives were used for testing in both RAID 0 and RAID 1 configurations on the Promise based ports. Testing was also conducted using a single SATA drive, and an IDE drive connected in a primary slave configuration.
Note on all RAID based IDE subsystem tests below: There is a known issue with the implementation of the Promise controller on the ASUS motherboard causing severe write related slowdowns, as seen in the tests below. The issue has been reported, and is currently being researched.
Ignoring the write test numbers, it seems that the best performance with a RAID 0 array with 128k block size goes to the PATA drives. Both the mixed drive scenario and the SATA only drive scenario could not touch the read performance of the PATA drives. The RBS of the PATA array bettered the others by more than 20 MB/s. However, the PATA drive performance came at the price of a high RAT of a bit above 15ms.
Again we see the PATA only array leading the pack performance wise, but the gap between it and the mixed array and SATA only array has closed significantly. The read performance of all array types has almost doubled, just by reducing the array block size to 16k.
The results here are a bit more shocking. Both the mixed and PATA only RAID 1 arrays had almost identical performance, with the SATA only array lagging behind the pack. The SATA only array read test results lagged the other two by almost 15k, with its RBS trailing the mixed and PATA only arrays by more than 20 MB/s.
As seen in the RAID based tests, the both the Promise connected PATA drive and the primary slave connected PATA drive trounce the SATA drives in the read tests, by almost 15k. The write performance lead is a bit less, but still favors the PATA connected drives by 5-7k. The two things that the SATA connected drives have going for them is their low RAT of just a bit above 12ms, and their low CPU utilization of around 2%.
Network Utilization Tests
Hagel Technologies’ DU Meter software was used in conjunction with Windows Task Manager to measure the performance of the onboard 3Com Gigabit NIC. DU meter was used to measure bandwidth, with Windows TaskMan to monitor the CPU utilization on the test system. For the test itself, a 760Mb archive file containing various sized .WMA audio files for the large file transfer test and a 760Mb worth of various sized .WMA audio files for the small files transfer test were used in conjunction with an Intel Gigabit NIC on the host system, and a crossover cable to connect the host system to the test system. A crossover cable was used to rule out any possible bandwidth losses due to hub or switch passage.
I continue to be impressed with the performance of the integrated Gigabit Ethernet controllers. In both the upload and download tests, the integrated controller performed excellently, with the download sustained rate coming in a bit faster than the upload rate and both exceeding 20 MB/s. The CPU utilization was a bit high, averaging between 30-40%, but is acceptable given the connection speeds achieved.
The large file transfer results almost exactly mimic those of the small file tests, with the gap between the download and upload sustained rates being a bit more. All in all, ASUS chose well in mating this controller with the board.
Test Systems
The following system configurations were used for the Sandra memory benchmark graph, as well as all graphs listed under the Application and Gaming Benchmark sections:
ASUS P4C800 (i875P) - Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz CPU (clocked at 12x250 and 15x200), Intel Pentium 4 2.53 GHz CPU (clocked at 19x133) - 2 x 256Mb Corsair XMS3200 - ATI Radeon 9700 Pro w/ ATI Catalyst 2.3 drivers - 40 GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD - Allied 400w PSU - WindowsXP w/SP1
NOTE: For all benchmark tests done on the P4C800 motherboard, the optimized default BIOS settings were loaded for the benchmark tests. The following BIOS settings were also engaged during the tests: CAS Latency Time = 2; RAS Precharge delay = 2; RAS-to-CAS delay = 3; Active Precharge delay = 5.
ABIT IC7-G (i875P) - Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz CPU (clocked at 15x200) - 2 x 256Mb Corsair XMS3200 - ATI Radeon 9700 Pro w/ ATI Catalyst 2.3 drivers - 40 GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD - Allied 400w PSU - WindowsXP w/SP1
Intel D875PBZ (i875P) - Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz CPU (clocked at 15x200) - 2 x 256Mb Corsair XMS3200 - ATI Radeon 9700 Pro w/ ATI Catalyst 2.3 drivers - 40 GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD - Allied 400w PSU - WindowsXP w/SP1
ABIT BH7 (i845PE) - Intel Pentium 4 2.53 GHz CPU (clocked at 19x133) - 2 x 256Mb Corsair XMS3200 - ATI Radeon 9700 Pro w/ ATI Catalyst 2.3 drivers - 40 GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD - Allied 400w PSU - WindowsXP w/SP1
ASUS A7N8X Barton (nForce2): AMD AthlonXP 3000+ CPU (clocked at 13x166); 2 x 256MB Corsair XMS3200; ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, onboard nForce2 10/100 NIC; 40 GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD, Zalman 300w PSU. WindowsXP w/SP1, ATi Catalyst 2.3.
Graphs are labeled as follows: Motherboard - CPU Clock - FSB Clock - Memory Clock
SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth Benchmark
As expected, the ASUS board keeps up with the other i875P based boards when running CPU and memory at a 200 MHz FSB. The Intel board is the leader at stock settings, though, with the ASUS board marginally beating it out when the bus is bumped to 250 MHz.