The Southbridge Battle: nforce 6 MCP vs. ICH7 vs. ICH8

Intel 82801GR (ICH7-R, 975X)

The 975X chipset's ICH7R Southbridge offers four USB 2.0 controllers with two ports each, and four Serial ATA/300 ports with Intel's flexible Matrix Storage Technology, which supports various RAID modes.

ICH7 supports up to eight USB 2.0 ports. The Universal Serial Bus works on a controller base as well, and these eight ports are provided by four root controllers. Most motherboards offer two or maybe three USB 2.0 port pairs at the connector panel on the back side; additional USB 2.0 headers are usually located somewhere on the motherboard and can be utilized by installing appropriate headers.

While adding more Serial ATA ports and another USB 2.0 controller to ICH8 doesn't seem to be a big deal, more changes were made by the Intel engineers: ICH8 is superior to ICH7 in all of our I/O benchmarks and in most of the SATA throughput benchmarks.

There are even more differences when we look at USB 2.0 performance; if you attach only a single drive, there is only very little difference between the three contenders. However, both ICH8 and nforce 6 MCP sustain higher throughput per device (almost 30 MB/s instead of ~20 MB/s when two drives are copying data).

Patrick Schmid
Editor-in-Chief (2005-2006)

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.