Thus far, our only experience with Intel’s platform controller hub code-named Patsburg is X79 Express. However, the same piece of silicon is also used as a foundation for the C600 chipset family.
We’ve long known that X79 didn’t expose all of the core logic’s integrated functionality. It comes close, but there’s an entire Storage Controller Unit that goes unused. Actually, that’s not entirely true. We recently saw ECS’ X79R-AX enable four SAS ports in Seven $260-$320 X79 Express Motherboards, Reviewed.
The PCH that ECS employs corresponds to the –B variant of C600. Otherwise identical to X79 (including the same 14 USB 2.0 ports, an integrated gigabit Ethernet MAC, eight lanes of second-gen PCIe, and HD Audio), the –B model officially adds four 3 Gb/s SAS ports to the four 3 Gb and two 6 Gb/s SATA connectors. Intel’s Rapid Storage Technology enterprise driver facilitates RAID 0, 1, 10, and, with the addition of a BIOS update, RAID 5 support with hardware-based XOR across the SATA ports. SAS is limited to RAID 0, 1, and 10, though you can add an upgrade ROM to get RAID 5 as well.
| Intel C600 Chipset | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| -A | -B | -D | -T | |
| PCH-Based SATA 3Gb/s Ports | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| PCH-Based SATA 6Gb/s Ports | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| SCU-Based Ports | 4 x SATA | 4 x SAS | 8 x SAS | 8 x SAS |
| RSTe SATA RAID Support | RAID 0/1/10/5 | RAID 0/1/10/5 | RAID 0/1/10/5 | RAID 0/1/10/5 |
| RSTe SAS RAID Support | No | RAID 0/1/10 | RAID 0/1/10 | RAID 0/1/10 |
| RST3 SAS RAID 5 Support | No | No | No | Yes |
| Silicon-Based RAID 5 XOR | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| PCI Express 3.0 x4 Uplink | No | No | Yes | yes |
Stepping up to the –D SKU doubles SAS connectivity to eight ports. Add that to the PCH’s native SATA and you end up with two 6 Gb/s ports and 12 3 Gb/s ports. Now, consider that C600 connects to one Xeon E5 processor via DMI 2.0—a four-lane PCIe 2.0-like link with 20 Gb/s of bidirectional throughput. That's a bottleneck just waiting to happen. So, Intel connects the PCH's SCU directly to four PCIe lanes hijacked from one of the processors, alleviating traffic from the storage controller.
The flagship –T version is functionally identical (including the eight SAS ports and four-lane uplink), only it includes RAID 5 support for the SATA and SAS ports, too. It’s not clear how much of a premium stepping up through the C600 hierarchy adds to Xeon E5-ready motherboards. However, if you were planning on buying an add-in HBA or RAID controller anyway, the option to get much of that functionality on-board is certainly convenient.
If you don’t need any of that fancy stuff, there’s a baseline –A model with four SATA 3Gb/s ports and six SATA 6Gb/s ports, four of which are tied to the SCU. It still supports RAID 0, 1, 10, and 5, and it includes hardware-based XOR, too. There’s just no SAS connectivity.
- Xeon E5-2687W: Replacing The Best With Something Better
- Meet The Xeon E5s
- Intel C600 Chipset Family
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: Sandra 2012
- Benchmark Results: Adobe Creative Suite CS5.5
- Benchmark Results: Media/Encoding
- Benchmark Results: Rendering
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Percent Faster: Xeon E5s Vs. Xeon 5600s
- Power Consumption And Efficiency
- Xeon E5: Respectable Performance Boost, Bigger Efficiency Gain
I'd be really surprised to see these in gaming machines, even in the high end boutiques. That's a $2k processor they reviewed, and basically all it offers over the $1k SB-E chip (for gamers) is an extra pair of cores, which games can't make use of.
Anandtech benched those next to the new Xeons. Went about as well as Bulldozer vs. Sandy Bridge.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5553/the-xeon-e52600-dual-sandybridge-for-servers/6
Mentioned on the test page--I've invited them to send hardware and they haven't moved on it yet.
Great article! I was not expecting my mind to be blown away today, and it was
I'd be really surprised to see these in gaming machines, even in the high end boutiques. That's a $2k processor they reviewed, and basically all it offers over the $1k SB-E chip (for gamers) is an extra pair of cores, which games can't make use of.
Anandtech benched those next to the new Xeons. Went about as well as Bulldozer vs. Sandy Bridge.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5553/the-xeon-e52600-dual-sandybridge-for-servers/6
Mentioned on the test page--I've invited them to send hardware and they haven't moved on it yet.
I would guess that's because Interlagos is garbage compared to the new Xeons and they know it. I don't think they're terribly eager for the front page of Tom's Hardware to show the low end Xeon's beating the best Interlagos has to offer.
Sorry, vote me down all you like, but the title was just silly.
Not really my place to speculate--only to point out that I similarly wanted to see AMD hardware included and explain why it isn't there
No, the title is a fairly common phrase in American English.
"Now that I've got X, I can really do some damage" would probably be the way I hear it used most often.
Yeah, I understand that you're in a sensitive position. But being a lowly commenter, I'm free to speculate all I want!
Muahahahaha!
Precisely ;-)
In my opinion, the SolidWorks test is also one of those not representative of typical SolidWorks tasks. PhotoView only renders realistic images of a SolidWorks model. Personally, I think the Specviewperf SolidWorks test would be significantly more representative of average SolidWorks use.
Although I really hate to draw this comparison, PhotoView is more like using Power Point to organize a display of images created in Photoshop. In this comparison, most of the grunt work is done by Photoshop rather than Power Point, as is most of the grunt work done in SolidWorks then rendered in PhotoView. Performance differences revealed by the Specviewperf test are more informative, IMHO. See these.
we have to wait to long for that..
Reading this however, all I can do is think how PO'ed I am at Intel not enabling the 7th & 8th cores on the SB-E i7-3960X and i7-3930K.
I'm going to drop these into X79 and compare the numbers to see how power is affected. Maybe get a little overclocking out of them, just to check ;-)