cmcquistion said:
BTW, Hotkoala, what benchmarking software are you using for your hard drive performance measurements? What kind of controller are you using, what kind of hard drives and how many? What other motherboards have you tried this setup on and how did the measurements differ? Were any of those other motherboards dual AMD boards? I don't think I've ever owned a motherboard that let me choose which PCI slot I wanted to boot from first.
I used a whole bunch. All except atto. All those that came with sandra, systemmark, PCmark, and a couple others. Most of the time my moving 300-500MB sound files back and forth. It should not take 15-20 mins on RAID for a 500MB file.
I use seagates. I have everything from their old 7 lbs 5400's to 15000 RPM drives over the last 4 years. My IDE is whatever I get from CompUSA. I don't care about IDE enough to pay attention. I'm pretty sure that they should not be topping out at 25MB/sec tho'.
I'm comparing to an ALi Magik1, an i850, a BX, another MPX, and a i860. Of course the only valid 64-bit PCI comparison would be from the i860. This admittedly was my first AMD dual, not that I had many choices. I waited around for MP things to be fixed before I went ahead with it. Prior to I was all Intel duals.
No, not all dual mobo's let you choose which PCI booted up first. Only the real ones do. The ones that have no overclocking options, and voltage options..et-c.
The problem is that not all PCI cards are the same size. My raid for example uses SDRAM. The older 32-bit only used EDO. Regular SCSI controller I use for my drives and CD-changer has nothing. But to position it in a way to the cables don't get in the way of eachother is rather hard if you can't choose which to boot up when. That and my soundcard like to hog the bus so I can only put cards in certain places.
I always thought it was due to WinXP and their horrid SCSI performance. But moved the server to a Win2K system is still wasn't the same as before. Sometimes I swear my 100Mbit LAN transfers faster than the MPX from drive to drive on the same mobo.
I haven't tried the Powerstrip thing to change my latency, mostly because I won't be bothered by it. Some got a slight improvement others barely any. Wasn't worth it to me.
As of now I'm using 6 10K's in RAID5 on this rig. 3 15K in RAID-5 as the file server. Random 7200 and 5400 drives singles for storage.
Mayhaps I'm the only one on crack or have badluck. My 2nd K7D-L from Newegg looked like someone returned it. The only good they do for me is convert/resampling musique in mass quantities. I stand by what I say. Bandwidth still hurts. For someone who just wants to do GAH/FAH in the background while using their computer as they would a uniprocessor otherwise, it's fine.
