Synthetics, Continued
PC Mark's System Test compares several system functions and shows the Digital Storm Twister Extreme with only a mild lead over the AVA Direct system.
PC Mark 2005's CPU test shows more of the four-core advantage we sought, but not the 100% increase we might have expected. AVA Direct does fairly well here, simply by not falling flat in face of Digital Storm's brawn.
Even though the Digital Storm Twister Extreme runs its memory at DDR2-1066, the AVA Direct system nearly catches it in PC Mark 2005's Memory Bandwidth test. The likely reason for these good results is that the AVA Direct uses a much higher CPU FSB, where the single-channel CPU FSB is one of the "bottlenecks" to dual-channel memory bandwidth.
Both systems rely on Western Digital's 10,000 RPM Raptor 150 GB drive, yet the Digital Storm gets a big performance advantage by using two of these in the RAID controller's Level 0 mode. The actual 26% performance increase is nowhere near the theoretical 100% maximum gain, but is typical of "software" RAID controllers.
