KT600 better for GigE and RAID0 over nF2U?

[Braxus]

Choices choices... What I'm wondering is if I'll see better overall performance with a KT600 based chipset over my current nF2U due to the KT600 southbridge having integrated RAID support which frees up the PCI bus. I know the nF2U is a better performing chipset with dual channel mem, but if one throws in Gigabit Ethernet and RAID, think it becomes more of a tossup.

Any thoughts?

If only someone came up with something like Intel's 875's GigE CSA/ICH5R combo. I'd be in heaven.

 

[cmetz]

Braxus, in my testing, an AMD XP Barton 2500+ in an AN35U / nf2 motherboard, dual-PC2700 (was better memory bandwidth than dual-3200), PCI gigE performance was at best 2/3 of P4 2.4/875 dual-PC3200 performance. I don't have a KT600 to test with, but a 1900+ in a MSI KT333-based board, single PC2100 was at best 1/3 of the modern Intel platform. CSA added a bit to the Intel platform's performance, but less than I expected (probably because we're talking about the difference between about 900Mb/s and 950Mb/s... as you get close to the peak it gets much harder to get that last bit of performance).

If absolute performance is important to you, the Intel 875P platform is your best bet.

If price/performance is important, the nf2 platform is better. (The Intel setup described cost about double what the AMD 2500+/nf2 setup cost)

No data on the KT600, but they have a known bad rep when it comes to PCI I/O performance.

Supposedly, nVidia's socket 939 A64 chipset will have a CSA-like integrated gigabit Ethernet on the north bridge. This might be interesting. However, nVidia's current Ethernet controller is good but not great in terms of performance, and nVidia are fairly free-OS hostile (no programming specs), so I'm not particularly waiting for this solution. Still, it's good to see that someone other than Intel sees that it's an interesting thing to do - Via, SiS, and ATI will likely follow suit.

 

[mechBgon]

Keep an eye open for the new nVidia southbridge that features native SATA RAID and native gigabit Ethernet. That oughta liven up the party for you If it performs anything like the nForce3 version is reported to perform, then you should have nice performance... I read that the nF3 variant was hitting about 1700-1800Mbit/sec full-duplex transfer rates in benchmarking.