Hi all,
I'm wondering about the effectivness of pci I/O cards. I've identified the last bottlneck in my system, and it's the disk I/O. It's a Gigabyte board with nForce2 chipset, and everything else about it is fast enough for my purposes, except the disk I/O. I've got the newest gigabyte drivers, and in my Device Manager, under the Primary IDE tab, it says "Current Transfer Mode-UDMA 5".
I believe that's ATA 66 or 100. Either way, in my old board--a cheap biosstar with a VIA chipset--that same mode was there but the disk i/o was significantly faster. I notice this in my graphics app which is thrashing horribly (which is another issue but to be expected under the circumstances). On the old board that thrashing took only a second or two to finish--now it takes 15-20 seconds. (the drive is defragged every night, and I've tried both Cached and Uncached writes).
An unscientific test I do is to take a 100 meg. file and copy it from one drive to another, back and forth, and average the times. In the old biosstar it took under 4 seconds. Now, with the Gigabyte, it takes at least 15 seconds (cached or uncached writes--it seems to make no difference). That's a huge bottlneck.
So...before I wait for Gigabyte to come up with a better i/o accelerator (like Intel's, which I've tried on intel chipsets and is very fast), I'm going to try a pci i/o card. My question is: I've read that the Southbridge chipset does the pci i/o, and is not nearly as fast as the Northbridge, so will the pci card, going through the Southbridge chip, handle 100 MB per second? That's around 1 Gigabit--which I've heard that the Nrthbridge was only recently able to hit that mark. Or...could it be anything else that is causing the board not to handle disk I/O well? Some other hidden setting? I've got all the cmos params. set to Auto, and the drives do support mode 5 (the old board did it just fine w/same drives). I'd like to avoid adding another card when the mobo should handle this in the first place. Thanks for any insight on this,
--jsteph
I'm wondering about the effectivness of pci I/O cards. I've identified the last bottlneck in my system, and it's the disk I/O. It's a Gigabyte board with nForce2 chipset, and everything else about it is fast enough for my purposes, except the disk I/O. I've got the newest gigabyte drivers, and in my Device Manager, under the Primary IDE tab, it says "Current Transfer Mode-UDMA 5".
I believe that's ATA 66 or 100. Either way, in my old board--a cheap biosstar with a VIA chipset--that same mode was there but the disk i/o was significantly faster. I notice this in my graphics app which is thrashing horribly (which is another issue but to be expected under the circumstances). On the old board that thrashing took only a second or two to finish--now it takes 15-20 seconds. (the drive is defragged every night, and I've tried both Cached and Uncached writes).
An unscientific test I do is to take a 100 meg. file and copy it from one drive to another, back and forth, and average the times. In the old biosstar it took under 4 seconds. Now, with the Gigabyte, it takes at least 15 seconds (cached or uncached writes--it seems to make no difference). That's a huge bottlneck.
So...before I wait for Gigabyte to come up with a better i/o accelerator (like Intel's, which I've tried on intel chipsets and is very fast), I'm going to try a pci i/o card. My question is: I've read that the Southbridge chipset does the pci i/o, and is not nearly as fast as the Northbridge, so will the pci card, going through the Southbridge chip, handle 100 MB per second? That's around 1 Gigabit--which I've heard that the Nrthbridge was only recently able to hit that mark. Or...could it be anything else that is causing the board not to handle disk I/O well? Some other hidden setting? I've got all the cmos params. set to Auto, and the drives do support mode 5 (the old board did it just fine w/same drives). I'd like to avoid adding another card when the mobo should handle this in the first place. Thanks for any insight on this,
--jsteph
