ULi M1695 PCIe/AGP for Athlon 64 – Part 2 with SLI
by Wesley Fink on August 5, 2005 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Disk Controller Performance
With so many chipsets and brands of storage controllers on current Athlon 64 boards, we standardized on Anand’s storage benchmark, first described in Q2 2004 Desktop Hard Drive Comparison: WD Raptor vs the World, as a standard means of measuring disk controller performance. To refresh your memory, the iPeak test was designed to measure "pure" hard disk performance, and in this case, we kept the hard drive as consistent as possible while varying the hard drive controller. The idea is to measure the performance of a hard drive controller with a consistent hard drive. We played back Anand’s raw files that recorded I/O operations when running a real world benchmark - the entire Winstone 2004 suite. Intel's IPEAK utility was then used to play back the trace of all the IO operations that take place during a single run of Business Winstone 2004 and MCC Winstone 2004. To try to isolate performance difference to the controllers that we were testing, we used Seagate 7200.7 model SATA and IDE hard drives for all tests.iPeak gives a mean service time in milliseconds; in other words, the average time that each drive took to fulfill each IO operation. In order to make the data more understandable, we report the scores as an average number of IO operations per second so that higher scores translate into better performance. This number should not be used to report hard disk performance as it is just the number of IO operations completed in a second. However, the scores are useful for comparing “pure” performance of the storage controllers in this case.
In past benchmarking, IDE has provided the slowest IO performance in this roundup. However, ULi and ATI IDE break that trend, with IDE performance being the best that we have measured since we have been testing with iPeak.
There are no additional SATA/SATA2 controllers on the ULi M1695 Reference Board 2, but for IDE or SATA disk storage, the ULi M1567 delivers outstanding storage performance.
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Kinesis - Thursday, August 18, 2005 - link
Someone may have asked this, but I didn't see it, my apologies if this is a duplicate. But will these boards support AMD's dual core chips?ElJefe - Saturday, August 20, 2005 - link
Not only will it support it... it is the only one out that DOES support it truly. It needs no bios revision, it is built into the original bios to support it. asus, gigabyte and abit all warned me that it is highly likely that if you purchase any of their boards and put a dual core cold on them as a new system, the computer wont "post" and just sit there. youll need to buy a 939 chip or borrow someones if it isnt this m1695 asrock board. really, there hasnt been much growth since this has been reviewed in boards, so none have put the dual core bios as their official starter/tested/stable bios yet.and from reading 100's of legitimate forum entries from all 3 of those main companies, i can say that I would never do dual core without going for a board that is brand new. the problems and conflicts are rather universal and rather pathetic.
I am not sure why there isnt talk of this much in forums around here, but if you read the forums of those places you will see obvious problems (abit is the worst at the moment though, which is most unfortunate as they were my favorite company for many years)
bozilla - Friday, August 12, 2005 - link
I'm not sure if someone asked this...but is it possible to use existing AGP card and PCI-e card on the same board with Crossfire for example with this chipset? Let's look at this like this. I have an AGP X800XT PE now and I want to buy a X850XT PE Crossfire edition in PCI-E and put both in the motherboard that comes out with this chipset. Possible?Wesley Fink - Saturday, August 6, 2005 - link
nVidia has sent us the following information:"The ULI board isn't certified for SLI. It hasn't been submitted."
nVidia added that modified nVidia drivers generally indicate a board that is not certified.
nserra - Monday, August 8, 2005 - link
Well it isn't selling any way, why certify it?ElJefe - Tuesday, August 9, 2005 - link
just a tip:someone said that Asrock usa isnt going to sell this mobo in the US of A, that is not true, i called today and it definitely is going to be sold here very soon.
mino - Saturday, August 6, 2005 - link
Actually this is understandable. Why bother to certify an preview board ? For a company like Uli this would be a waste of time and money.deathwalker - Saturday, August 6, 2005 - link
I'm looking forward to the release of Mobo's on this chipset. I want to upgrade to a socket 939 system and at the same time be able to keep costly components that I have(6800gt agp card for one)for use in it. I hope we se a micro ATX version that I can drop in a Aspire X-Qpack case. Good job Anandtech for picking up on this upcoming release and covering it for your dedicated subscribers. I don't think Tom's Hardware even knows this exists..not a whisper on there site about this chipset.Zebo - Friday, August 5, 2005 - link
Not really because I already bought a AN8 Utlra.. A, as in Abit. That's really what ULi needs for wide-spread adoption.. ABIT/DFI/ASUS/Gigabyte/MSI branded boards with wild OC options.. not Asrock/tul/ECS. I waited and waited for a decent SiS755 board which was also very promising.. which never came. I'm betting the same will happen here, especially so now that board makers have to make room in their stable for ATI based chipsets.nserra - Monday, August 8, 2005 - link
But Uli offers AGP 8X, no one does this, so they will be “forced” to support it.