Southbridge Battle: 780a, ICH10 and SB750, Compared

Benchmark Results: I/O Performance

RAID 0 clearly delivers the highest I/O performance on the database benchmark. Intel leads here, followed by Nvidia and AMD. LSI takes last place, but the gap to AMD is small. LSI’s new controller doesn’t provide more database performance than its competitors, but its I/O performance is always rather independent from CPU performance, especially when rebuilding. This is where LSI is clearly fastest.

If you need high file server performance, you’ll get the best RAID 0 results on the the Intel ICH10R, followed Nvidia, AMD, and LSI solutions. The ranking is different if you switch to RAID 5. Intel’s ICH10R springs to the lead again, followed by the professional LSI controller and Nvidia. AMD takes last place in this event.

Intel outperforms the others in the Web server I/O benchmark by 80 percent. It is capable of delivering the same performance when working on a degraded array as the other products in regular RAID 0 or RAID 5 operation.

The workstation I/O test seem well-suited to the ICH10R, as it delivers really high I/O performance numbers in RAID 0 and RAID 5. LSI offers the fastest overall workstation I/O performance after Intel and is twice as fast as AMD and Intel in degraded RAID 5.