Nforce2 mobo has issues with PCI transfer rate??

[pillage2001]

How true are these claims??

 

[mechBgon]

On my classic nForce 220D board, I get PCI transfer rates in excess of 120Mb/sec from my SCSI card. My nForce2 board should arrive tomorrow. Watch here for an update. The MCP-T southbridge that hosts the PCI bus is the same in both, so I'm not expecting a difference.

They might be running into issues with nVidia's "performance" IDE drivers. Using the WHQL IDE drivers included in nVidia's UDP2.0 rather than the "SW" drivers has solved issues for people who were having trouble with CD copying and such, so it could be that too. If you know German, you might email them this tip from Insane3D:

Actually, it's real easy...

When you install the Nvidia 2.0 driver pack, it will ask you if you want to use the Performance "SW" drivers. If you reply no, it installs the normal WHQL ones...

 

[pillage2001]

I was not aware of this prob till I stumbled upon it in another forum. I believe if the problem holds, Nvidia would not have gotten far till today.

 

[rbV5]

Man, I hope not...I'm liking the ASUS board, but I need good PCI transfers......I guess I'll hold off a wee bit more

 

[pillage2001]

Anybody wanna stick a Promise controller onto the PCI bus and test it out for us??

 

[pillage2001]

BoNk

 

[chizow]

Might be onto something here, will know more about it tomorrow

Chiz

 

[mechBgon]

My SCSI result is not going to be relevant for most people's purposes, so I've decided to take my IDE drive to work with me and run ATTO benchies on both my old nForce 220D board and my nForce2 board. I'll try to do benchies using both varieties of nForce2 IDE drivers: Performance and also WHQL-certified. For starters, I've run the ATTO benchie using my IDE drive on a KT333 board as a baseline:

• Asus A7V333-RAID with onboard USB 2.0 and onboard Promise IDE RAID controller disabled, PCI latency set to 240
• 2 x 256Mb Crucial PC2100 DDR at SPD timings
• AthlonXP 1600+ running at 166MHz FSB, 1:1 with RAM (so RAM is at PC2700 speeds here)
• Seagate Barracuda ATA IV, 2Mb cache, 7200RPM, Auto Acoustic Management disabled, on the KT333's built-in IDE controller, on its own IDE cable
• FAT32 partition results here.

I know they're rather strange (reads slower than writes?!) but whatever, that's what I get on my KT333 board. As you can see, some of the marks are in the low 40Mb/sec range like they should be for this drive, which maxes around 45Mb/sec throughput in theory. Can it achieve these results on nForce and nForce2? Stay tuned for tomorrow's exciting episode!

EDIT: if you want to try the ATTO benchie yourself, go here, put in your name and email (nope, they haven't spammed me), then pick ATTO ExpressPCI HostAdapter Utilities and then download the Windows SCSI Utilities 1.63. They work on both SCSI and IDE drives.

 

[pillage2001]

Originally posted by: mechBgon
My SCSI result is not going to be relevant for most people's purposes, so I've decided to take my IDE drive to work with me and run ATTO benchies on both my old nForce 220D board and my nForce2 board. I'll try to do benchies using both varieties of nForce2 IDE drivers: Performance and also WHQL-certified. For starters, I've run the ATTO benchie using my IDE drive on a KT333 board as a baseline:

• Asus A7V333-RAID with onboard USB 2.0 and onboard Promise IDE RAID controller disabled, PCI latency set to 240
• 2 x 256Mb Crucial PC2100 DDR at SPD timings
• AthlonXP 1600+ running at 166MHz FSB, 1:1 with RAM (so RAM is at PC2700 speeds here)
• Seagate Barracuda ATA IV, 2Mb cache, 7200RPM, Auto Acoustic Management disabled, on the KT333's built-in IDE controller, on its own IDE cable
• FAT32 partition results here.

I know they're rather strange (reads slower than writes?!) but whatever, that's what I get on my KT333 board. As you can see, some of the marks are in the low 40Mb/sec range like they should be for this drive, which maxes around 45Mb/sec throughput in theory. Can it achieve these results on nForce and nForce2? Stay tuned for tomorrow's exciting episode!

Are you narrating for some cartoon??

 

[Svenn]

Could this be the cause of my low RAID scores? I'm using a Promise Fasttrack SX4000 with 256MB Cache on an Epox 8RDA+ with 2 Western Digital Special Edition 8MB Cache 120GB drives. My ATTO write scores cap around 45k and the max I've had the reads is 80k. 80k isn't bad but I can't get it constant. I've been fooling with the settings for 3 days now and I'm not satisfied with my scores... I wonder...

 

[mechBgon]

Sven, try reinstalling the nForce unified drivers, but say "No" when it asks to install the Performance IDE drivers, and let us know what happens?

 

[pillage2001]

Originally posted by: Svenn
Could this be the cause of my low RAID scores? I'm using a Promise Fasttrack SX4000 with 256MB Cache on an Epox 8RDA+ with 2 Western Digital Special Edition 8MB Cache 120GB drives. My ATTO write scores cap around 45k and the max I've had the reads is 80k. 80k isn't bad but I can't get it constant. I've been fooling with the settings for 3 days now and I'm not satisfied with my scores... I wonder...

45k or 45Mb/s???

Dayum. Seems that the NForce2 MIGHT have some problem afterall.

 

[mechBgon]

I think he means 45000 kilobytes/sec, not 45000 bytes/sec.

 

[rbV5]

Stay tuned for tomorrow's exciting episode!

Thanks!

 

[Svenn]

I tried with and without the nVidia Performance drivers and didn't really notice a difference. My writes always cap at 45k in ATTO, or right around there. It's been bugging the crap out of me. I'm trying all sorts of stripe and cluster sizes and the writes never pass 45k. The reads have been up to 80k as I've said, but I can't get that constant. 80k read and write and I'll be happy... Any suggestions on other settings to try?

And I mean 45k ATTO Score... I don't even know what that's measured in.

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: pillage2001

Originally posted by: Svenn
Could this be the cause of my low RAID scores? I'm using a Promise Fasttrack SX4000 with 256MB Cache on an Epox 8RDA+ with 2 Western Digital Special Edition 8MB Cache 120GB drives. My ATTO write scores cap around 45k and the max I've had the reads is 80k. 80k isn't bad but I can't get it constant. I've been fooling with the settings for 3 days now and I'm not satisfied with my scores... I wonder...

45k or 45Mb/s???

Dayum. Seems that the NForce2 MIGHT have some problem afterall.

After reading that link I got a bit curious. My 3ware 7000-2's write results are abysmal....20Mbps in DiskBench (Writes X number of X-sized blocks of data for a total file size of X*X), almost worse than ATA-66. My ATTO results are nothing spectacular either, ~15 MBPS write from block sizes 128 to 1024 and ~52 MBPS read speed for the same blocks. Everything lower drops precipitously. Also has me wondering if this might be part of the cause of my 9700pro/video overlay/tuner problems. All 3 PCI cards I use stress the PCI bus (3ware RAID, Audigy 2, and TV Tuner).

I tried all the different MCP-T (the WHQL MCP-T IDE, and the S/W IDE) IDE drivers, didn't seem to make any difference. What did they end up doing to fix the initial problems on the Nforce 1?

Anyways, wanted to see Mech's results with his various PCI before commenting further, but I guess there's no point holding back now

Chiz

Edit: The 3ware is a hardware RAID card, interestingly though, I had much better write scores with softRAID cards (Sil680 and HPT370 based). Diskspeed32 results are about the same, average transfer around 72 Mbps, but its a synthetic bench in every sense.

 

[mechBgon]

Sven, if you don't mind cannibalizing your RAID, it would be interesting to hear how your ATTO benchies come out when you plug one of the WD's into the onboard IDE channel, and also how your Fastrack benches with just one drive attached.

 

[mechBgon]

chizow, if you're feeling like an experiment, what happens if you run the benchmark with the Audigy2 out of the system?

 

[Svenn]

I've been formatting and trying different cluster and strip sizes for days, trying those isn't a bad idea. If this is true, does this mean my 9700 is suffering from low transfer rates because of my RAID card?

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: mechBgon
chizow, if you're feeling like an experiment, what happens if you run the benchmark with the Audigy2 out of the system?

I'll try it tomorrow. Also, to be fair, I was running my tuner when I was running the tests (I try not to mess with it when I get an image, you know, like when you had the rabbit ears aligned perfectly, you didn't want to move?). But again, I don't think it would impact the write speeds so dramatically, even if the PCI bus is being saturated...hmmm....gonna turn off the tuner and test again.

Chiz

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: Svenn
If this is true, does this mean my 9700 is suffering from low transfer rates because of my RAID card?

Since the AGP bus is separate from not only the PCI bus, but also the whole southbridge, you wouldn't think so. But sometimes reality has a way of rudely interrupting my theories

Are we having fun yet?

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: mechBgon

Originally posted by: Svenn
If this is true, does this mean my 9700 is suffering from low transfer rates because of my RAID card?

Since the AGP bus is separate from not only the PCI bus, but also the whole southbridge, you wouldn't think so. But sometimes reality has a way of rudely interrupting my theories

Are we having fun yet?

This could be an issue with video overlay though, ie. tv tuners and PCI hardware DSP encoder/decoders, as data is passed through the SB to NB.

Chiz

 

[pillage2001]

Originally posted by: mechBgon

Originally posted by: Svenn
If this is true, does this mean my 9700 is suffering from low transfer rates because of my RAID card?

Since the AGP bus is separate from not only the PCI bus, but also the whole southbridge, you wouldn't think so. But sometimes reality has a way of rudely interrupting my theories

Are we having fun yet?

AGP bus is an independent bus. It should not have any affect on the PCI.

I can't wait for the results.

 

[Svenn]

I'm installing WinXP on a single drive on the 8rda+ ide controller... We'll see how this comes out...

 

[pillage2001]

Originally posted by: Svenn
I'm installing WinXP on a single drive on the 8rda+ ide controller... We'll see how this comes out...

You're doing it all by tonight??

w0000000t. We're onto something big here. I would help out but I've only a Kt266A board.