ASUS Crosshair IV Formula 890FX Chipset Motherboard Review
Network Throughput
The Gigabit PCIe Ethernet controllers vary on each board, so it will be interesting to see what the performance is on all the boards. Each of the Socket AM3 boards uses a different Gigabit Controller. Let’s take a look at what controller is on each of the boards.
- ASUS Crosshair IV Formula – Marvell 8059 Gigabit LAN controller
- ASRock 890GX Extreme3 – Realtek RTL8111E
- Biostar TA890GXB HD – Realtek RTL8111E
To test the Gigabit PCIe Ethernet controllers we used the NTttcp tool to test Ethernet Throughput and the CPU utilization of the various Ethernet controllers used on the AMD Motherboards. To do this properly we set up one machine as the server; in this test and Intel Core I7 930 system with an EVGA X58 Tri-SLI motherboard acted as our Gigabit LAN server.
On the server side, we used the following Command Line for Gigabit PCIe Ethernet Testing:
Ntttcpr -m 4,0,
On the client side (the motherboard being tested), we used the following Command Line:
Ntttcps -m 4,0,
At the conclusion of each test we recorded the throughput and CPU utilization figures from the client screen as that is the system being tested.
Benchmark Results: All three of the boards that we tested had nearly the same throughput. What separates them is the CPU Usage; the ASRock 890GX Extreme3 and the BIOSTAR TA890GXB HD are both using the Realtek RTL8111E Gigabit Ethernet controller and they both utilized ~7.3% of the available CPU. The ASUS Crosshair IV Formula uses a Marvell 8059 Gigabit Ethernet LAN controller and used only 1.82% of the CPU which is only a quarter of what the other boards used!
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