Sapphire PURE Innovation - ATI's Chipset for the AMD Enthusiast

Disk Controller Performance

With so many chipsets and brands of storage controllers on current Athlon 64 boards, we needed a means of comparing performance of the wide variety of controllers. The logical choice was Anand's storage benchmark first described in Q2 2004 Desktop Hard Drive Comparison: WD Raptor vs the World. To refresh your memory, the iPeak test was designed to measure "pure" hard disk performance, and in this case, we kept the hard drive as consistent as possible while varying the hard drive controller. The idea is to measure the performance of a hard drive controller with a consistent hard drive. We played back Anand's raw files that recorded I/O operations when running a real world benchmark - the entire Winstone 2004 suite. Intel's IPEAK utility was then used to play back the trace of all the IO operations that take place during a single run of Business Winstone 2004 and MCC Winstone 2004. To try to isolate performance difference to the controllers that we were testing, we used Seagate 7200.7 model SATA and IDE hard drives for all tests.

iPeak gives a mean service time in milliseconds; in other words, the average time that each drive took to fulfill each IO operation. In order to make the data more understandable, we report the scores as an average number of IO operations per second so that higher scores translate into better performance. This number is meaningless as far as hard disk performance is concerned as it is just the number of IO operations completed in a second. However, the scores are useful for comparing "pure" performance of the storage controllers in this case.

The Sapphire PURE Innovation is a really excellent performer in iPeak tests. The new SB450 turned in some of the highest iPeak measurements that we have yet seen in IDE and on-board SATA. While the SATA controller of the SB450 is not the SATA 2 used by the NVIDIA nForce4, its performance is even faster than nF4 when running our stock SATA drive.

In past benchmarking, IDE has provided the slowest IO performance in this roundup. However, ATI IDE breaks that trend, with IDE performance to be the best that we have measured since we have been testing with iPeak.

Sapphire and ATI have also done an excellent job in implementing the Silicon Image 3132 chipset for SATA 2 performance. The 3132 was blazing fast in our benchmarks, setting new iPeak performance records. For disk storage - IDE, SATA, or SATA 2 (with the Sil3132) - the Sapphire ATI delivers outstanding storage performance.