Sapphire PURE Innovation - ATI's Chipset for the AMD Enthusiast
by Wesley Fink on July 29, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
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.
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RobFDB - Saturday, July 30, 2005 - link
Guess you missed where i said "(with the exception of MSI)". Learn to read mate before you go posting.RobFDB - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
ATI and Sapphire should be congratulated for bringing the AC880 to AMD users. We had it good with Soundstorm but since then onboard audio as gone back several steps (with the exception of MSI). Its good that AMD users are being given the option to have quality onboard audio.bob661 - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
This what impresses me the most about these boards is this codec support. I still won't buy an ATI chipset until the third or fourth version comes out (you guys can test it for me) but impressive features and performance nonetheless.jab98 - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
*codecerwos - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
"[AMD] Enthusiast" is written with a capital E in the article, and it should not be, since it's not a proper noun. Please fix this error, because it looks grossly unprofessional to anyone with a reasonable command of the written word.RobFDB - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
Really though, get over it. It doesnt matter in the slightest if we're being honest here. Anyway back to more important matters.I'm really happy that ATI have managed to bring a top performing board aimed at enthusiasts to market. I was also extremely impressed to see Sapphire implement 4v for the RAM. One issue that i'd like to see investigated is wether the cold boot issue that affects DFI NF4 boards using OCZ VX mem @ high voltages affects the Sapphire board too. Aside from that this is a very impressive showing from ATI. One last thing. I have a x850XT PE and i'm not sure if that can be used as a slave card when ATI bring out the R520. If so that would make a very attractive upgrade.
rjm55 - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
The X850XT PE works fine as a slave with the X850 Master Card. In demos at Computex, ATI was showing an X850 Master with an X850XT PE slave.Jojo7 - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
This isn't exactly true. Ati distributed a special driver that SIMULATED crossfire. The actual cards were really just 2 identical x850xtpe's. Though, one probably had an altered bios to simulate a master card.Read it for yourself: http://anandtech.com/weblog/default.aspx?bid=231">http://anandtech.com/weblog/default.aspx?bid=231
dlamblin - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
Did I miss the mention in the article? Is this an ATX or an mATX board. I'm guessing the former, but it wouldn't be out of place to list the fact along side the rest.erwos - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
It's ATX. If it has more than four slots, it's too big to fit the mATX standard.