WAV crunchin', Raytracing, KribiBench, SATA
Time to look at WAV crunchin'.
Not much to see here, folks, apart from the 2GHz Athlon 64 clocking in at just below 200s and the P4 bunch producing similar times. The benchmark is accurate to within a single second, and each board hovered around the 165 - 166s mark. It's more of a question of sheer MHz power here.
Realstorm's Raytracing benchmark shows a marked preference for the Athlon 64. However, the VIA PT880 sandwiches itself in between the i875P and the SiS655FX chipsets. Remember that the latter is running the test 3.2GHz CPU over 15MHz faster than the other three Intel boards.
KribiBench is an easy-to-use benchmark from Adept Development. It's a software (read subsystem) renderer that's capable of rendering amazingly complex scenes. The benchmark can be downloaded from here and features models with 16.7 billion polygons.. The test is the rather easier JetShadow model with the realistic setting. The interaction of the CPU, Northbridge and system memory makes a slight but consistent difference to the results. The reference board exhibits near-Canterwood performance again. Not too shabby for VIA's first Intel-based dual-channel attempt.
The ref. board boasted no less than 6 SATA ports, 4 run from the VT82387 Southbridge and the other 2 via a discrete PCI-driven VIA VT6420 SATA controller. What's pleasing about VIA's take on on-chip SATA is the ability to run 4 drives (PHY permitting) in RAID0+1 format. It's also nice to see that users can migrate from standard drives into a RAID format on-the fly, so to speak. VIA's V-RAID software is impressive in action. We tried a couple of Western Digital Raptors in RAID0 with a 64k block size.
The drives were set to RAID0 via the BIOS input screen. Had they not been so, the "1", "SPAN", and "0" settings would have come into play. The hot-swappable nature of SATA allows drives to be connected in an USB-like fashion. Those set the drives' structure from within Windows XP. It's interesting to see the utility think that the drives are attached via 80-pin cables.
A graph that resembles a mountain range still shows excellent random access speeds and a healthy average sustained transfer read rate. Of course, HDTach will never highlight the drives true potential. It's just comforting to see them working first time with no complications or hassle from the user's point of view.
