The Realtak chip was the only one operating in a board not based on the 875P chip set. The reason is simple: Most manufacturers today bank on CSA. Instead, a motherboard made by Gigabyte (GA-8S655TX Ultra) was used; it employs the 655TX by SiS. For our purposes, though, that made no difference, as the board actually operated just as fast as models with the 875P.
The current Realtek chip provided above-average performance in the synthetic benchmarks such as NetIo and NetIQ Chariot. Netperf, however, found that the Taiwan-based manufacturer logged the highest throughout rates among all competitors tested (though we could not discover that in our own practical benchmark).
But, of course, then there's the Realtek chip's cheap price. Consequently, the components by this manufacturer can be found on many motherboards these days.
Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.
