Processor: Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz EE (800MHz FSB) (Supplied by Intel) Motherboard: Gigabyte 8KNXP Ultra64 (Supplied by Gigabyte) Memory: 2x 512MB OCZ DDR-533 (Supplied by OCZ) Hard Disk: 2 x Seagate 7200.9 SATA in RAID 0 (Supplied by Seagate) Graphics Card: Gigabyte GeForce 6800GT (Supplied by Gigabyte) Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP SP2
Test System 2
Processor: Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz EE (800MHz FSB) (Supplied by Intel) Motherboard: ASUS P4GD1 Memory: 2x 512MB OCZ DDR-533 (Supplied by OCZ) Hard Disk: 2 x Seagate 7200.9 SATA in RAID 0 (Supplied by Seagate) Graphics Card: Gigabyte GeForce 6800GT (Supplied by Gigabyte) Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP SP2
For our testing we compared the Rocket RAID 2220 against its older brother, the RocketRAID 1820A to see how far these controllers have come.
The nature of the Gigabyte Ultra board is that it supports PCI-X slots with the ICH5-S Southbridge. The ASUS P4GD1 was selected due to its support for DDR memory, the same Socket 478 CPU but also supports PCI Express x1 slots, which is what we needed to run the Silicon Image 3132 PCI-E controller card.
HD Tach has been around for a long time and is excellent when it comes to testing hard drive performance. It is also a very handy program when it comes to testing the controller used on particular motherboards. Tests such as Read, CPU Utilization and Burst are available at a click of the button and give you a good idea of how the hard drive can perform from system to system.
Here we can see that the extra power of the SATA-3G setup manages to wipe the floor with the older 1820A controllers abilities.
