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- Date:
- Wednesday, July 09, 2003
- Author:
- Morry Teitelman
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Soltek SL-86SPE-L
Soltek’s i865PE based speed demon, sure to knock even the most hardcore enthusiast’s socks off. And it's purple too.....
Subsystem Testing
Audio – CPU Utilization
The audio subsystem is among the most critical subsystems on the motherboard. A strong on board audio solution bolsters an already well rounded board, while a poorly implemented solution can tarnish the reputation of an otherwise strong board. The easiest way to determine the audio subsystem’s quality is to measure the system’s CPU utilization while the system is in use. A solidly designed subsystem should have little to no impact on the system while in use, so that the precious CPU cycles can be used elsewhere. In order to best measure the real world CPU utilization of the audio subsystem, we use Ziff Davis’ Audio Winbench.
From the results of the synthetic benchmark tests alone, the SL-86SPE-L’s audio solution looks to be decent. In most cases, the CPU utilization hovered around 3%, with it jumping to around 5% during certain tests. The test results reveal that the audio subsystem could negligibly affect system performance under extreme duress situations. However, the results are based on synthetic testing and may not depict the real situation accurately
Audio – Subjective Listening
Synthetic benchmarking is all well and good for testing, but to really comprehend how well an audio subsystem performs, you must sample the sound produced first hand. A well thought out sound test should include music that pushes the intensity and harmonic limits of the subsystem. For this test, I dug deep in to my metal archives for the Smashing Pumpkins album Siamese Dream for testing. With this album, the Pumpkins maintained their edgy rock sound while demonstrating their musical adroitness.
The board performed like a champ. Not once did the sound skip, crackle, stutter, or pop. Furthermore, all of the high and low frequencies came across clearly with out any noticeable loss of sound quality.
Audio – In Game Testing
In addition to CD or MP3 playback, users most often rely on the audio subsystem for gaming, whether it is a stand alone first person shooter type or online death matching. To adequately test the quality of the audio subsystem during game type scenarios, I used a custom designed benchmarking script based on recorded bot matches developed by our own Brent Justice. The benchmark tool runs through three loops of each demo, one with sound disabled, one with normal 3D sound enabled, and the last with EAX 3D sound enabled.
As expected, the most amount of performance difference is seen in the low quality tests. However, the high quality tests are the most telling since there was no loss of frame rate whether or not the on board sound was enabled. I was most impressed with the sound with EAX mode enabled. In all cases, the sound was crystal clear with no detectable distortion. The on board sound will definitely not disappoint when used during intense gaming situations.
USB 2.0
In order to adequately test the capabilities of the on board USB 2.0 connection, we chose to use an ACOMDATA HD060U2FE-72-USB 2.0/FireWire HDD connected to the USB port in conjunction with TCD Labs’ HDTach program.
The performance of the external drive was good, but not the best I’ve seen with this drive. The measure RAT (Read Access Time) of just under 25ms was not too good for this drive, since most of the time it hits just under 20ms. The RBS (Read Burst Speed) was good, coming in at 28 MB/s. However, the average read and write speeds were a bit low, coming in approximately 4 MB/s under expected performance for this connection type. The CPU utilization, although a bit high compared to that of an IDE hard drive while in use, was much lower than expected.
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. Since this board has no in built RAID capabilities, testing was also using a single SATA drive and an IDE drive connected in a primary slave configuration.
As has been a common occurrence since SATA broke on to the scene, the IDE primary slave drive’s performance bests the SATA drives performance by a respectable margin. In both cases, the measured RBS (Read Burst Mode) was around 85 MB/s, about average for an ATA-100 IDE connection, but not too good for a 150 MB/s capable connection. As far as RAT (Read Access Time) goes, the SATA drive bests the IDE slave by a respectable 2 ms, with the IDE drive’s performance coming in just under 15ms. The average read and write numbers are the true performance measures of the drives. The SATA simply can’t keep up with the IDE slave drive, coming in just under 8 MB/s behind in the write tests and 13 MB/s behind in the read tests. In the case of the CPU utilization, the SATA drive took the crown with a utilization of less than 2%.
Network Utilization Tests
Hagel Technologies’ DU Meter software was used in conjunction with Windows Task Manager to measure the performance of the onboard Realtek 10/100 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 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. A crossover cable was used 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.
The Realtek’s performance was very good for a 10/100 card. Both the upload and download speeds hovered between 9-10 MB/s, which is expected when using a 100 Mb/s pipe. The CPU utilization was notably higher on upload than download, but again not outside the norms, hovering around 20% for the download testing and 30% for the upload tests.
The large file test performance mimicked that from the small file tests. My biggest complaint here isn’t the performance of the NIC, it performed admirably for a 100 Mb/s connection, but the fact that Soltek chose not to include a Gigabit capable NIC with their 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:
Soltek SL-86SPE-L (i865PE) - Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz CPU (clocked at 12x200) and Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz CPU (clocked at 12x250) - 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 SL-86SPE-L 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.
ASUS P4P800 Deluxe (i865PE) - Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz CPU (clocked at 12x250) - 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 IS7-G (i865PE) - Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz CPU (clocked at 12x250) - 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 P4C800 Deluxe (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
Note that all results above, with the exception of those from the BH7 board, were obtained running in Dual Channel mode.
The SL-86SPE-L makes a good showing across the board. It does come in last at stock 2.4GHz speeds, but it is able to keep up with the ASUS and ABIT 865PE boards running at 250 MHz FSB. We continue to see the i865PE’s dominance over the PAT enhanced i875P board.