Southbridge Battle: 780a, ICH10 and SB750, Compared

Test Setup And SSD Details

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System Hardware
Hardware Details
System I
CPU Intel Core i7-920 (45nm, 2.66 GHz, 8 MB L2 Cache)
Motherboard (Socket 1366) Supermicro X8SAX Revision: 1.1 Chipset: Intel X58 + ICH10R BIOS: 1.0B
RAM 3 x 2 GB DDR3-1333 Corsair CM3X1024-1333C9DHX
System II
CPU Intel Core i7-920 (45nm, 2.66 GHz, 8 MB L2 Cache)
Motherboard (Socket 1366) Asus Rampage II Gene Revision: 2.0G Chipset: Intel X58 + ICH10R BIOS: 0809
RAM 3 x 2 GB DDR3-1066 CorsairTR3X6G1600C8D
System III
CPU AMD AMD Phenom II X4 955 (45 nm, 3.2 GHz, 4 x 512 KB L2 and 6 MB L3 Cache, TDP 125 W, Rev. C2)
Motherboard (Socket AM3) Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P (Rev. 1.0) Chipset: AMD 790GX, SB750 BIOS: 3L (04/08/2009)
RAM 2 x 2 GB DDR3-1600 (Corsair CM3X2G1600C9DHX)
System IV
CPU AMD AMD Phenom II X4 955 (45 nm, 3.2 GHz, 4 x 512 KB L2 and 6 MB L3 Cache, TDP 125 W, Rev. C2)
Motherboard (Socket AM2+) MSI K9N2 Diamond Revision: 1.1 Chipset: Nvidia 780a BIOS: 2.4
RAM 2 x 2 GB DDR2-1066 GeIL (GE24GB1066C5DC)
HDD System Seagate NL35 400 GB ST3400832NS 7,200 RPM, SATA/150, 8 MB Cache
System Drive Controller Promise SATA 300 TX4
HDD 6 x Intel X25-E 64 GB SSD
Graphics Zotac Geforce GTX 260² GPU: Geforce GTX 260 (576 MHz) Graphics RAM: 896 MB DDR3 (1998 MHz) Stream Processors: 216 Shader Clock: 1242 MHz
Power Supply OCZ EliteXstream 800W OCZ800EXS-EU
Benchmarks
Performance Measurements h2benchw 3.12PCMark Vantage 1.0
I/O Performance IOMeter 2006.07.27File Server-Benchmark, Web Server-Benchmark, Workstation-Benchmark, Database-BenchmarkStreaming ReadsStreaming Writes
System Software and Drivers
Drivers Details
Operating System Windows Vista Ultimate SP1
AMD Chipset 9.6
Intel Chipset Chipset Installation Utility 9.1.0.1007
Nvidia Forceware 15.26
Nvidia Graphics 186.18
Intel Matrix Storage 8.7.0.1007
AMD RAIDXpert 2.4.1540

The Test Drives: 6x Intel X25-E Flash SSDs

Intel’s X25-E professional flash SSD has been the premier choice for high-end PC and workstation solutions due to its impressively high performance, both in throughput and I/O performance. Many other flash SSDs might be capable of delivering the same and even more than the 200 MB/s throughput, but most cannot maintain Intel’s high write performance, low latencies, and I/O performance numbers, which are still unmatched. The X25-E has a downside, though: it still costs several hundred dollars for today’s 32 or 64 GB models. Maximum performance comes at the expense of capacity.