Ethernet Performance

We used NTTCP to determine the peak throughput of each Ethernet controller. The host system was another NF4 Ultra board, with Firewall disabled.

Both NF4 boards pull ahead of the Soltek board, which uses a PCI based Ethernet controller.

Although NVIDIA has yet to fix the CPU usage issue in their drivers, 26% is about acceptable for a PCI-E based Gigabit Ethernet controller running at full tilt. However, NVIDIA claims theirs is hardware accelerated, so these results should be significantly lower.

USB & FireWire Performance

In an attempt to simplify our reviews a bit, I changed our USB2.0 and FireWire tests to a single chart, based on burst transfer rate. This gives us an idea of how fast each controller can run at peak throughput:

Abit's FireWire and USB2.0 controllers present no issues, and thus perform as expected (the same can't be said for some boards using a 1394b controller).

SATA Performance

HDTach was used to give a basic idea on how each SATA controller performs:

Performance is as expected, but the NF4 excels in simplicity. And it supports SATA 300 transfer rates, which only show a very small increase in performance at this point.

Next Page: (Worldbench 5)

Page 1: Introduction Page 2: Board Layout; Audio MAX Page 3: The BIOS Page 4: Benchmark Config; Memory Bandwidth Test Page 5: PCMark 05; CineBench 2003 Page 6: Gaming Performance Page 7: Audio Quality & Performance Page 8: Ethernet; USB2.0; FireWire; SATA Performance Page 9: Worldbench 5 Page 10: Overclocking; Conclusion