ASUS P8P67 and P8P67 Deluxe Intel Sandy Bridge 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 boards uses a different Gigabit Controller. Let’s take a look at what controller is on each of the boards.

• ASUS P8P67 Deluxe – Intel 82579 Gigabit LAN Controller
• ASUS P8P67 – Realtek 8111E
• ECS P55H-AK – Realtek 8111E

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 an Intel Core I7 970 system with an MSI Big Bang XPower 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,<Client IP> -a 4 -l 256000 -n 30000

On the client side (the motherboard being tested), we used the following Command Line:

Ntttcps -m 4,0,<Server IP> -a 4 -l 256000 -n 30000

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: The ASUS P8P67 Deluxe uses the Intel 82579 Gigabit LAN controller and the ECS P55H-AK and the ASUS P8P67 are both using the Realtek 8111E Gigabit LAN controllers. CPU usage between the ECS P55H-AK and the ASUS P8P67 systems using the Realtek controller was quite similar as was the network throughput. The ASUS P8P67 Deluxe using the Intel gigabit LAN controller had slightly lower throughput, likely nothing that would affect performance, but the CPU usage was significantly lower. In fact it was only 41% of the CPU usage of the next system.