Asus crippled ICH10 performance on their X58 boards.

Previously posted on my ANS-9010 review, but I created a new thread as this might be a wider issue than I thought.

I recently moved from Socket-775 to Socket-1366 and I discovered something very disappointing: the ICH10 on my X58 board was 10-35% slower (depending on the application) than the ICH10 implementation on my P45 board.

I replaced my trusty Asus P5Q-Deluxe (P45/ICH10R) with an Asus P6T vanilla (mainly due to the S775 holes, as I didn't want to take apart my watercooling setup). My E8400 was replaced by an i7 965 and my 2x2Gb Axerams by 3x1Gb Crucial 1333 DIMMs.
Everything else remains the same (Asus 280GTX, Corsair HX620, Acard ANS-9010 w/ 20Gb of DDR2, etc.)
Also, I did a fresh install of the OS I was using (Vista Ultimate SP1 x64) and used the same RAID drivers (8.7.0.1007) and same IMSM (8.7) I was using up to now.

I connected the ANS-9010's two SATA cables on ports 0+1 (same as in my P5Q-Dlx) and set up a RAID0 with 128Kb stripes, from scratch.

These are my findings

Old ICH10 RAID0 score - Asus P5Q Deluxe (BIOS 1406)
http://img185.imageshack.us/img185/5...0hdtachtq5.jpg

New ICH10 RAID0 score - Asus P6T (BIOS 0202)
http://img22.imageshack.us/img22/763...8ich10rqx1.png


At this point, I replaced all SATA cables, removed my DVDRW and my Samsung SSD storage drive, and moved the ANS-9010's second SATA cable from SATA port1 to SATA port2 on the motherboard (located on a different "pair" of SATA ports).

The results showed degraded performance again:

Old ICH10 RAID0 score - Asus P5Q Deluxe (BIOS 1406)
http://img50.imageshack.us/img50/720...iskmarkri2.jpg

New ICH10 RAID0 score - Asus P6T (BIOS 0202)
http://img3.imageshack.us/img3/3097/sataports02mb9.png


I am currently suspecting one of the following:

• Bad ICH10 implementation (generally) on the X58 chipset, or
• Bad ICH10 implementation (specifically) on Asus boards with the X58 chipset, or
• Bad ICH10 implementation (even more specifically) on the Asus P6T board, or
• User error :) - Something obvious (or not) that I am forgetting, and yes, all write caching options are on, from DevMan and IMSM.

So any feedback, hints, suggestions, appreciated. Especially from owners of X58 boards and multiple SSD RAID0 arrays :)

good info

really cool if a new bios fixed this for ya

Quote:

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Originally Posted by billdavis

good info

really cool if a new bios fixed this for ya

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I agree... otherwise no clue.:confused:

interesting

That's weird.
I haven't had any problems with 6 Mtron's on the ICH10R on the BloodRage.

Try turning write back caching in the Matrix Manager? (from Burst speeds it seems it's not on)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by alfaunits

Try turning write back caching in the Matrix Manager? (from Burst speeds it seems it's not on)

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It's already on:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Chosen.

...and yes, all write caching options are on, from DevMan and IMSM.

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Something that I found out though, is that these new i7 demons (QPI, NB frequency) etc. affect the storage performance.
When the system is sitting at default clocks, my HDTach read speed is around 300Mb/sec and the busrt speed is around 700Mb/sec.
When I overclock the above mentioned parameters including memory frequency (I know that ICH uses the system memory as cache, hence the ridiculously high burst speeds) and as a result I get higher HDTach read speeds than before (!!) around 380Mb/sec; also burst rate goes up (over 1000Mb/sec), not as high as P45-ICH10, but higher than before on the X58.
However, write speeds are not improved at all, stuck at the 250Mb/sec area...

Weird? All I need now is a neighbour with an X58 board other than P6T, to see if the problem lies with the Asus boards or X58 in particular.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by BenchZowner

That's weird.
I haven't had any problems with 6 Mtron's on the ICH10R on the BloodRage.

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Which motherboard did you use before? What kind of performance are we talking about (before+after)? Can you show us some numbers?
I'm trying to figure out who dropped the ball here (between Asus & Intel) so any feedback would be greatly appreciated :)

As you can see from the title change, I seem to have found the problem.
Will post the results in the next hour.

Ridiculous R&D and business decisions, shame on you, Asus... You just lost a long time, dedicated customer...

You found a resolution or just the "cause" of the problem ?
I can run some tests for you on non-Asus X58 ICH10R boards but only with 2 drives today as I haven't finished the tests for the review & I can't free the rest drives yet.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Chosen.

As you can see from the title change, I seem to have found the problem.
Will post the results in the next hour.

Ridiculous R&D and business decisions, shame on you, Asus... You just lost a long time, dedicated customer...

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Yeah, I'm been a long-time buyer of ASUS. This new x58 board I have is PISSING ME OFF. The whole x58 thing in general is a freakin' bug-ridden joke. I mean I love my i7, but these motherboards are just a big waste of friggin' money. Sleep resume doesn't work, SLi doesn't work on my board etc. AND THE F'ING THING COST $325!!

So this is how the "heart touching" engineering works:


First, you advertise loads of lanes for Tri-SLI, CrossfireX etc.


Then you put the graphics ports on a PCI-e v2.0 x16 bus:
http://img3.imageshack.us/img3/228/gfxdw1.png

Then the Gbit LAN on a PCI-e x1 bus (mainly because Gbit would be capped by PCI's bandwidth):
http://img3.imageshack.us/img3/4661/lanun1.png

Then the sound card on a PCI-e x1 bus as well (don't know why, probably cheaper):
http://img3.imageshack.us/img3/165/soundbg6.png


And then what do you do? You put the RAID controller & ICH10 on a PCI 66MHz bus:
http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/5458/raidqu6.png

http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/3071/ich10ms0.png




So, to recap
ICH10@P45 located on a PCI-e bus, cap at ~650Mb/sec:
http://img50.imageshack.us/img50/720...iskmarkri2.jpg
Fast storage not limited.

ICH10@X58 located on a PCI 66MHz bus, capped at 266Mb/sec:
http://img3.imageshack.us/img3/3097/sataports02mb9.png
Fast storage crippled.

With one foot in the SSD era, Asus decides to cut costs back, by sacrificing the Southbridge, well played and well designed...

Intel specsheet


By the way, this was also verified on a Rampage 2 Extreme, so don't get your hopes up, that paying more will guarantee you a decent design.

So, anyone else wants to test their X58 board with Everest and post the results back here?

I apologise for the emotional post, but if I hadn't paid $300 for this POS, I wouldn't feel the way I feel now :mad:

It amazes me how large companies can do things this smart.

Why are the randoms so crippled as well then? PCI bus shouldn't matter at all for those.

I just had a look on my X38 Everest readings ..exactly the same as on Chosen's X58 ..:shakes:

P5E64 EVO (X48) also uses PCI link...
This is ridicolous LOL!

The RAID controller is on the PCI bus? I assume it is 32-bit, 33MHz which is capable of up to 133MB/s and that's shared bandwidth. If so, how are you hitting 300MB/s?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DuckieHo

The RAID controller is on the PCI bus? I assume it is 32-bit, 33MHz which is capable of up to 133MB/s and that's shared bandwidth. If so, how are you hitting 300MB/s?

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A) According to the Everest report, it's PCI 66MHz.
B) Bandwidth for 66MHz PCI bus is 266Mb/sec.
C) The 300+ Mb/sec I achieved in the old motherboard. On this one, I have to overclock the p00 out of it to get closer, but the small reads and writes are still a fraction of what they are in other boards.

Grim news if true.

I was planning to migrate to X58 and SSD via onboard ICH10R soon (faster boot times than dedicated RAID card) but this makes me think whoa!

Can anyone else confirm this for Asus plus other manufacturers X58 boards?

I really hope that some of them are PCI-E linked!

So how many PCI-E lanes does the ICH10 have on a P45 board?

:eek: holy cow Batman

Can anyone check to see if the Rampage Extreme is the same as the X58 Rampage II Extreme

Wonder what will happen with the P6T v2...

Wait a minute Chosen. You were getting decent speeds on the P5Q Deluxe? I have that same board right next to me, and I see the ICH10R using a PCI bus as well. So what now? :shrug:

Also, I'm typing this message from my Bloodrage board and the ICH10 controller is on the PCI bus as well. I did notice however, that the JMICRON raid controller is on a PCIe x1 bus, and the Marvell SAS controller is on a PCIe x4 bus.

Luckily, I have 2x Raptors, 2 x Fujitsu 15K drives, and 2 Apex drives here to do some testing. :yepp:

Interesting and this is why I asked for anyone else with another board and some fast storage to try it.
It would be interesting if we could get some answers from Asus as to what they have done to the P6T's ICH10 to perform that badly, but that's a fairly optimistic expectation...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Media_Interface

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jazzy jeff

So how many PCI-E lanes does the ICH10 have on a P45 board?

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ICH9/10 have 6 PCI-E v1.1 lanes for shared onbard device bus' and low bandwidth PCIE v1.1 slots, ie 1x or 4x.

You should also note when you overclock the system on the Host Bus side, you'll improve data going out (read burst) due to additional Host Bus bandwidth and cycles but on the other hand you are also creating a queue on the data coming in because Host Bus can push more data faster than DMI bus bandwidth is there. Raising PCIE frequency helps stabilize the spikes in IO reads, and improves IO write bandwidth because DMI clock is generated by clock generator PCIE dividers. Raising PCIE frequency beyond design can introduce signal integrity degradation from unshielded external EMI or cross chatter from selecting a similar reference frequency to a vendors own unique reference frequency, and then all hell breaks loose on your system :)

X38/X48/X58 have 36 PCIE v2.0 lanes. 32 lanes for PCIE slot allocation. 4 lanes for DMI (direct media interface, which is a dedicated two way point to point link on PCIE v2.0 4x bus) interconnect host link between PCH (x58) / MCH (x38/48) and IOH (ICHx).

P35/P45/etc have 20 PCIE v2.0 lanes. 16 for PCIE slot, 4 lanes for DMI.

ICH has always been on DMI, which behaves similarly to PCI while at the same time behaving like PCIE with VC (virtual channels) layer for QoS and transaction scheduling / interleaving for all IOH root bridge outgoing transactions with TAD (target address decode) destination beyond IOH scope or incoming bus transactions from MCH with TAD lying inside IOH.

ICH is given priority on DMI VC's and allowed to request priority transactions for dedicated 1-2 PCIE lanes. 300MB/sec is probably just the amount of DMI transaction bandwidth the ICH is limited to, because there are important LPC and SMBUS devices also living on the IOH and lest we forget all the routing management, strobe requests, priority transactions, and so on.

Both your lack of understanding and failure to take the time to go to Intels website and find the ICH datasheet for your model to get a better idea of "how Asus is screwing you over", you might have realized that Asus while many things still has to stick to Intel specifications for board chipset mechanical and electrical design, and on top of that you might have saved the Internet from the wild fires that you started in PC news gossip columns.

You should try and understand something or at least ask somebody who does understand it, to get a clearer picture on what actually happens. Even if it doesn't mean much to you to understand something, doing so is the key to not looking like a fool on the Internet or being sued for defamation outside the Internet.

Wild claims cost companies lost business, they lose enough they'll sick their lawyers on you to seek damages.

Very interesting info, do we know if Asus stuck to the X58 whitepapers? How much can the board manufacturer deviate from the original plans?

I just connected the ANS-9010 on my Gigabyte mATX G33 board (ICH9) and it works just fine at 370 & 300 Mb/sec....

I'm running out of ideas for things to check...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mikeyakame

Both your lack of understanding and failure to take the time to go to Intels website and find the ICH datasheet for your model to get a better idea of "how Asus is screwing you over", you might have realized that Asus while many things still has to stick to Intel specifications for board chipset mechanical and electrical design, and on top of that you might have saved the Internet from the wild fires that you started in PC news gossip columns.

You should try and understand something or at least ask somebody who does understand it, to get a clearer picture on what actually happens. Even if it doesn't mean much to you to understand something, doing so is the key to not looking like a fool on the Internet or being sued for defamation outside the Internet.

Wild claims cost companies lost business, they lose enough they'll sick their lawyers on you to seek damages.

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I thought that was Chosen's main goal here...to understand why the difference of performance. Can't these forums be used as such? Whitepapers are good and all, but feedback here can be explained much better.

I agree..putting any blame soley on Asus is not the right way of doing things, but I really just took his post as wanting some answers.

Anyway, here are some more questions:

So when you talk about DMI and the 300MB/s limit, you are refering to the link between the northbridge and southbridge for the ICH controller..correct?

So what is up with the PCI reference for the ICH9/10 Raid controller in Everest?

Given the 300MB limit..how do people like Chosen and others explain higher seq read numbers. Overlocking? Something doesn't sound right.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mikeyakame

ICH9/10 have 6 PCI-E v1.1 lanes for shared onbard device bus' and low bandwidth PCIE v1.1 slots, ie 1x or 4x.

You should also note when you overclock the system on the Host Bus side, you'll improve data going out (read burst) due to additional Host Bus bandwidth and cycles but on the other hand you are also creating a queue on the data coming in because Host Bus can push more data faster than DMI bus bandwidth is there. Raising PCIE frequency helps stabilize the spikes in IO reads, and improves IO write bandwidth because DMI clock is generated by clock generator PCIE dividers. Raising PCIE frequency beyond design can introduce signal integrity degradation from unshielded external EMI or cross chatter from selecting a similar reference frequency to a vendors own unique reference frequency, and then all hell breaks loose on your system :)

X38/X48/X58 have 36 PCIE v2.0 lanes. 32 lanes for PCIE slot allocation. 4 lanes for DMI (direct media interface, which is a dedicated two way point to point link on PCIE v2.0 4x bus) interconnect host link between PCH (x58) / MCH (x38/48) and IOH (ICHx).

P35/P45/etc have 20 PCIE v2.0 lanes. 16 for PCIE slot, 4 lanes for DMI.

ICH has always been on DMI, which behaves similarly to PCI while at the same time behaving like PCIE with VC (virtual channels) layer for QoS and transaction scheduling / interleaving for all IOH root bridge outgoing transactions with TAD (target address decode) destination beyond IOH scope or incoming bus transactions from MCH with TAD lying inside IOH.

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Very interesting information, I have spent the last 48 hours trying to figure out how things work inside my motherboard.
Not because I have to (somebody who spends $300 for a new motherboard expects steps forwards, not backwards), but because I spend my time in my pc more than just playing games.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mikeyakame

ICH is given priority on DMI VC's and allowed to request priority transactions for dedicated 1-2 PCIE lanes. 300MB/sec is probably just the amount of DMI transaction bandwidth the ICH is limited to, because there are important LPC and SMBUS devices also living on the IOH and lest we forget all the routing management, strobe requests, priority transactions, and so on.

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I don't know about this, I have seen higher transfer rates on the ICH family, like for example the half Gb/sec that a pair of X25-E's can achieve:
http://i383.photobucket.com/albums/o...m5-2008/11.jpg

Also, through practice, it has been found that the actual (practical) cap of the ICH10 is ~660Mb/sec, as stated earlier in the thread. For example, three X25-M's that could in theory perform 3*250Mb/sec=750Mb/sec, are capped at:
http://i383.photobucket.com/albums/o...m5-2008/28.jpg

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mikeyakame

Both your lack of understanding and failure to take the time to go to Intels website and find the ICH datasheet for your model to get a better idea of "how Asus is screwing you over", you might have realized that Asus while many things still has to stick to Intel specifications for board chipset mechanical and electrical design, and on top of that you might have saved the Internet from the wild fires that you started in PC news gossip columns.

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A) And who told you that I haven't been in the Intel site researching? Hence my question earlier, on "how much does a motherboard manufacturer have to stick to the reference design of the chipset manufacturer?".
B) I couldn't care less about Asus' reputation at this point. If this was the subject of my thesis, I would be sending polite emails to Asus and I would be patiently awaiting for their feedback. However, there is a $300-thin line between "asking" and "demanding/being entitled to".
I had problems with Asus motherboards in the past, and all I did was to send an email to their product support team and wait forever for a dry answer like "We don't support RAID controllers on the PCI-E x16 slots" and the solution so far was always simple yet expensive: get rid of it and buy/try a new board.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mikeyakame

Wild claims cost companies lost business, they lose enough they'll sick their lawyers on you to seek damages.

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And bad products cost consumers lost money, what is your point? That I should shut up and don't dare accuse the mega-company for a product with a major flaw? This is not how it works mate.
The root-cause behind this performance degradation is unknown to me, and I am making assumptions based on all the information that I come across; the performance degradation of the "new and improved" product though, is a fact whether they (Asus) like it or not (I certainly don't).

Back on the subject now, I will assume that your criticism had good intentions and you were not just trying to contrast your expertise against my very basic knowledge on the subject, but the fact remains that in theory it all works lovely and in an identical way between the P45's and the X58's implementations of the ICH10, but in practice there is a performance drop between 40% (transfer rates) and 500% (small reads/writes) and I think that all involved stakeholders should be aware of it, both Asus and the consumers who spend their money hoping on an "upgrade".
Any objections on that?

MAN if this pans out as a definite problem... we need a new thread detailing, what RAID controller is on what on all x58 boards!

Very interesting. I came from a P45 to the x58 I have now. I never though to bench the differences. I still have both boards and I think I'm going to do some serious testing on the two...

This post has garnered enough attention to be put in the TechReport.com Tuesday Shortbread. Wow.

I think the original thread title could have been a bit less incendiary, since "Asus crippled" sounds like a willfully hurtful intent, and I don't think we can prove that at all here. This *could* be fixed by a bios update, or it *could* be an X58 chipset issue, right?

I've seen a lot of Asus reps replying to poor ratings on Newegg, maybe you should go there and explain the situation and give it a 1-star. That would probably get more attention than this thread would.

On my board (M3A79-T Deluxe) Everest reports the SATA controller (and IDE) are on 66Mhz PCI controllers. At a guess that would limit them to under 250MB/sec. Everest does state the soutbridge is an SB700, when I know it should be an SB750 though, so I'm not prepared to say I'm 100% convinced by the results.

As for a BIOS update 'fixing' issues like this I'm less than convinced that's possible. Is this problem not more likely to be due to the way the PCB is traced rather than the way the BIOS works? I'm asking because I don't know...

So, here's my 2 TITAN's on my ASUS P6T WS Pro's ICH10R (x58). I guess I'm not sure if I'm having this issue or not.
http://img242.imageshack.us/img242/4...0wceapeuk4.png
http://img185.imageshack.us/img185/6...0wceapefv7.png

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Chosen.

Very interesting information, I have spent the last 48 hours trying to figure out how things work inside my motherboard.
Not because I have to (somebody who spends $300 for a new motherboard expects steps forwards, not backwards), but because I spend my time in my pc more than just playing games.


I don't know about this, I have seen higher transfer rates on the ICH family, like for example the half Gb/sec that a pair of X25-E's can achieve:
http://i383.photobucket.com/albums/o...m5-2008/11.jpg

Also, through practice, it has been found that the actual (practical) cap of the ICH10 is ~660Mb/sec, as stated earlier in the thread. For example, three X25-M's that could in theory perform 3*250Mb/sec=750Mb/sec, are capped at:
http://i383.photobucket.com/albums/o...m5-2008/28.jpg


A) And who told you that I haven't been in the Intel site researching? Hence my question earlier, on "how much does a motherboard manufacturer have to stick to the reference design of the chipset manufacturer?".
B) I couldn't care less about Asus' reputation at this point. If this was the subject of my thesis, I would be sending polite emails to Asus and I would be patiently awaiting for their feedback. However, there is a $300-thin line between "asking" and "demanding/being entitled to".
I had problems with Asus motherboards in the past, and all I did was to send an email to their product support team and wait forever for a dry answer like "We don't support RAID controllers on the PCI-E x16 slots" and the solution so far was always simple yet expensive: get rid of it and buy/try a new board.


And bad products cost consumers lost money, what is your point? That I should shut up and don't dare accuse the mega-company for a product with a major flaw? This is not how it works mate.
The root-cause behind this performance degradation is unknown to me, and I am making assumptions based on all the information that I come across; the performance degradation of the "new and improved" product though, is a fact whether they (Asus) like it or not (I certainly don't).

Back on the subject now, I will assume that your criticism had good intentions and you were not just trying to contrast your expertise against my very basic knowledge on the subject, but the fact remains that in theory it all works lovely and in an identical way between the P45's and the X58's implementations of the ICH10, but in practice there is a performance drop between 40% (transfer rates) and 500% (small reads/writes) and I think that all involved stakeholders should be aware of it, both Asus and the consumers who spend their money hoping on an "upgrade".
Any objections on that?

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I apologize for coming across so harsh, the intention of my post was supposed to come across as helpful! It was pretty late when I wrote it after all. All I meant to say was the topic of the original post was that it might come across as Asus did it in on purpose to hurt the customer, when actually they didn't and it's a problem they aren't sure of or know what they did wrong to cause it. On the other hand too, there are many wildfires spread around Internet forums by guys who assume because they see something that doesn't seem right, those "experts" don't bother researching and just throw accusations and rumours around which hurt companies if they are false. As long as you did your research I respect that, just need to be a little more what would you call it, "diplomatic" about such a thread title :D

I agree there is a performance drop but what attributes to it is beyond me. I've seen similar on all Asus boards where the ICH is capped to bandwidth, and read/writes are up and down. Some vendors have solid performance on their boards, and there is no explanation really.

There are two reasons that come to mind that could be the cause of it.

1) Design problem they overlooked when they were too busy making the boards overclock for WRs.

2) Bios problem either on part of American Megatrends (AMI) or Asus. Now this seems more likely to be a problem. PCI / Port routing is controlled by bios code, also IRQ allocation. If the shared IRQ the ICH is on somehow restricts its performance because the other device/s on same IRQ hinder it by hammering out too many requests on the port its through routed through that could be fixed by routing tables in bios. There is also the case of MSI/MSI-X (messaged signal interrupts) which is a higher level protocol allowing overlap and bus scheduling on shared interrupt ports, typically an IRQ requests a lock on bus and no other devices can use the bus during this interrrupt, until the requesting device releases the lock, so not being made correctly or handled right can result in seriously degrading performance. I'd hate to think of all the other reasons that may cause this degradation too, it's painful!

I think Asus really need to sit down with AMI about the core bios code and figure this problem out, whether its software (bios) or their hardware design.

If it's AMI's fault then they can work together to resolve it, or if its Asus engineers misunderstanding of AMI core bios implementation I'm sure AMI would be happy to help them figure the problem out too. This is resolvable at least and would show good will to the customers if they really sorted it out, provided it's not hardware design level.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mikeyakame

I apologize for coming across so harsh, the intention of my post was supposed to come across as helpful! It was pretty late when I wrote it after all. All I meant to say was the topic of the original post was that it might come across as Asus did it in on purpose to hurt the customer, when actually they didn't and it's a problem they aren't sure of or know what they did wrong to cause it. On the other hand too, there are many wildfires spread around Internet forums by guys who assume because they see something that doesn't seem right, those "experts" don't bother researching and just throw accusations and rumours around which hurt companies if they are false. As long as you did your research I respect that, just need to be a little more what would you call it, "diplomatic" about such a thread title :D

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Makes much more sense when you put it this way, I have edited again (sigh) the thread title until further feedback from other X58+SSD owners flows in.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mikeyakame

I think Asus really need to sit down with AMI about the core bios code and figure this problem out, whether its software (bios) or their hardware design.

If it's AMI's fault then they can work together to resolve it, or if its Asus engineers misunderstanding of AMI core bios implementation I'm sure AMI would be happy to help them figure the problem out too. This is resolvable at least and would show good will to the customers if they really sorted it out, provided it's not hardware design level.

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I am almost convinced that the integrity of the whole SB structure was compromised/sacrificed in favour of the additional SLI capabilities, not native on the X58 by itself. There are many core differences between the P5Q and the P6T and one of my theories goes like this:
- In the P45 chipset the memory controller is located on the motherboard and possibly "closer" (in terms of electrical signals) to the SB, hence the 3.5-4Gb/sec burst speed (as system memory is used for caching by the ICHxR's).
- In the X58 the memory controller is located inside the processor, and might be further away from the SB (again, not talking about inches here), or that this PCI/PCI-e peculiarity that could be unaffected by the MC on the motherboard, finally takes the hit because of the IMC on the Nehalem architecture.

I keep feeling that I am getting closer but I keep getting a bit more lost, or if you prefer keep having to delve deeper within unknown territories to get an answer.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by headala

I've seen a lot of Asus reps replying to poor ratings on Newegg, maybe you should go there and explain the situation and give it a 1-star. That would probably get more attention than this thread would.

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I thought about this yesterday, but exactly because my purpose is not to harm Asus as a company or their sales numbers, I didn't want to post such information in the egg, where the majority of users/buyers have no clue what the ICH is or what the HDTach numbers mean and would be happy to buy a new stable board; that would be pointless. It might have caused a more immediate reaction by Asus, in the likes of "Please contact our Tech Support team and blah-blah" but the damage done to the (theoritically unaffected by this issue) majority of the board's potential buyers/average Joes, would be disproportionate to the help that I would get from the PR-ish Asus rep who monitors the Newegg reviews :)
I think I have better chances of finding out what the story is, by asking here :)

Can everyone post your board spec?

My ASUS Maximus II Formula shows
Device Description Intel 82801HB/IB ICH8/ICH9 - SATA RAID Controller
Bus Type PCI

Device Features
66 MHz Operation Supported

I am not sure if this information alone can help us get to any conclusions, that's why I insisted on owners of fast SSD storage.
The idea behind this, is to post some numbers involving small reads/writes (where the difference is more obvious) along with your motherboard and storage specs and in combination with information from Everest (or any other program that provide such information).
This way we could cross reference the results with existing ones on the net and see whether your X58-based ICH10 offers similar or seriously degraded performance.

I can only allocate two Mtron 3535 SSD's and 4 Samsung F1 1TB HDDs for testing immediately at this time, don't have the time required to backup my data to free more SSDs now.
For starters I've hit 550+ MB/s read/write rates on the ICH10R with the BloodRage

Gentlemen, if you are testing with Titan or Apex you are going to need 256k stripe which no boards ICH9/10 will offer (unless someone slipped it in..if so please tell me)
If you are using 4 standard SSD's you are probably going to need 256k stripe.
128K stripe is really only good over 2 standard (1 controller non internal raid) ssd's

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Originally Posted by Tony

Gentlemen, if you are testing with Titan or Apex you are going to need 256k stripe which no boards ICH9/10 will offer (unless someone slipped it in..if so please tell me)
If you are using 4 standard SSD's you are probably going to need 256k stripe.
128K stripe is really only good over 2 standard (1 controller non internal raid) ssd's

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Hi Tony,

Can you explain why?

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Originally Posted by RealTelstar

Hi Tony,

Can you explain why?

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There is an explanation in the stickies on the OCZ forums.

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Can everyone post your board spec?

My ASUS Maximus II Formula shows
Device Description Intel 82801HB/IB ICH8/ICH9 - SATA RAID Controller
Bus Type PCI

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Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P...same as above (ASUS).

At the moment, I am running 2 Velociraptors (raid0), so not noticing any of the throughput thresholds listed in thread.

Was running a few quick tests last night...

FWIW I ran some benches at my 4.0GHz 920 OC, then at completely stock, nothing changed at all. Same exact good speeds from the ICH10R.

Although not an SSD owner, I'd bet this is an issue on the Gigabyte X58 Extreme board too. I'm running 1.5 TB Seagate drives on the ICH10R and with 5 drives in raid 5 I was maxing out in the mid 250MB/s range for reads. Since I am too afraid to do one huge partition, I keep everything in 1-2TB partitions and tried a Raid 0 partition across the 5 drives and still maxed out in the 250MB/s range.

Strange enough, this was the same as I had with 4 drives in the system, and I'm rebuilding the arrays with a 6th drive today. If I can't get 6x 7200.11's to put out more than 250MB/s tonight in Raid 0... I'd suspect this is the issue. I have two 8 channel HW raid cards coming so I'll test this also.

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Originally Posted by Spoiler

I thought that was Chosen's main goal here...to understand why the difference of performance. Can't these forums be used as such? Whitepapers are good and all, but feedback here can be explained much better.

I agree..putting any blame soley on Asus is not the right way of doing things, but I really just took his post as wanting some answers.

Anyway, here are some more questions:

So when you talk about DMI and the 300MB/s limit, you are refering to the link between the northbridge and southbridge for the ICH controller..correct?

So what is up with the PCI reference for the ICH9/10 Raid controller in Everest?

Given the 300MB limit..how do people like Chosen and others explain higher seq read numbers. Overlocking? Something doesn't sound right.

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:rofl:

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Originally Posted by Halk

On my board (M3A79-T Deluxe) Everest reports the SATA controller (and IDE) are on 66Mhz PCI controllers. At a guess that would limit them to under 250MB/sec.

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Wrong... the "PCI bus" indication in Everest merely reflects that Intel had to assign some virtual bus to the DMI rather than inventing an entirely new type of bus classification. Read the thread carefully.

Once again people... the "PCI bus" thing in Everest is VIRTUAL, not material to the performance issue at hand.

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Originally Posted by WonderSausage

Wrong... the "PCI bus" indication in Everest merely reflects that Intel had to assign some virtual bus to the DMI rather than inventing an entirely new type of bus classification. Read the thread carefully.

Once again people... the "PCI bus" thing in Everest is VIRTUAL, not material to the performance issue at hand.

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I did say I wasn't convinced by the results :P

You said "once again" have you posted about this before?

well if the PCI bus isn't the reason for decreased performance, any ideas on what is?

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Originally Posted by Ender17

well if the PCI bus isn't the reason for decreased performance, any ideas on what is?

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My guess would be something in the BIOS. :shrug:

Although, honestly, I can't imagine a lot of people who are dropping the big bucks on SSD arrays are crippling them by running them on the onboard soft-RAID anyway.

Be curious to see what my 1+0 WD Black array does, when I get it together later this weekend.

Information on the ICH's connection on the x58 is readily available in concise form here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_X58

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Originally Posted by CodeNinja

My guess would be something in the BIOS. :shrug:

Although, honestly, I can't imagine a lot of people who are dropping the big bucks on SSD arrays are crippling them by running them on the onboard soft-RAID anyway.

Be curious to see what my 1+0 WD Black array does, when I get it together later this weekend.

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ICH10R is better for SSDs than many hardware RAID cards

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Originally Posted by Ender17

ICH10R is better for SSDs than many hardware RAID cards

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Really? That seems counter intuitive to me. Good info to know, though.

just curious
whats ure everest buffered scores are

my velociraptor raid 0 is reading on 7800-8000mb/s

http://i287.photobucket.com/albums/l...ntitled-29.jpg

hdtach burst speeds are around 4k.

edit i think i know why ts having a poor result in his x58

dude enable volume write back

my result on burst especially
8k with write back
440mb with disabled

Looks like a cache benchmark to me...

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Originally Posted by Ender17

ICH10R is better for SSDs than many hardware RAID cards

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How so? Which SSDs?

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Originally Posted by TimoneX

How so? Which SSDs?

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Intel X25-E for example.

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Originally Posted by One_Hertz

Intel X25-E for example.

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I figured you'd say that. :) I saw one of your own reviews that showed large gains in some operations with hw raid. I seem to recall you stating that the controller added latency though. My HW raid setup is adding latency as well...a whopping .2ms of it. .4 vs .2 according to HDTune. I haven't tried it on the ICH10R yet. These are cheapy patriot warps though($50 each). The Intel XM25-E is the best SSD available IMO...unfortunately I am not willing to spend $1000+ on a couple of them.

Not arguing with you btw...never used the extremes. I'm a cheap bastahd!

I did use OCZ solids on both ICH10R & the adaptec 3085 and it simply wasn't acceptable. Never entirely got rid of the stutter. These warps are lightning fast and very smooth. HW raid and cheapy SSDs are in fact a viable alternative to pricey(quality) SSDs IMO.

*removed*

So what happened to this discussion? Was there any resolution?

I've discovered the degraded performance on my x58 Rampage 2 Extreme with Intel G2 80gb SSD. Its mainly 4k read/writes but results are down across the board compared to ICH7R.

Using an old bios (0804) I get proper performance but that is hardly ideal.

http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/3796/23538950.png

my 3 disk in raid0 stripe 128kb.

first test cache off

second test cache on

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Originally Posted by Chosen.

I am not sure if this information alone can help us get to any conclusions, that's why I insisted on owners of fast SSD storage.
The idea behind this, is to post some numbers involving small reads/writes (where the difference is more obvious) along with your motherboard and storage specs and in combination with information from Everest (or any other program that provide such information).
This way we could cross reference the results with existing ones on the net and see whether your X58-based ICH10 offers similar or seriously degraded performance.

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Hey Chosen,
I have 3x 160GB G2 drives in RAID 0 on the ICH10R of a P6T deluxe board. Would you like IO stats on this array? I know you've already got P6T results so there's no point in posting unless you think it would be helpful.

Please do I just got a Asus P6T SE lol ....

There is no way that Intel put the disk controller behind the traditional PCI bus. It just looks like it to random software utilities walking what is presented to them looking like PCI busses.

However, I remember that a similar problem existed with 975x versus 965p. Clocking and features aside, a couple things were just going quicker on the cheaper chipset, which also came later.

Possible reasons could exclude:

• More checksumming or other error correction or other safety going on in the disk subsystems in x58. Intel has a history of putting all the safety features only into the more expensive board chipsets.
• Same as above, but on a Windows driver level (anybody tried Linux?)
• In general, driver differences between the two chipsets' Windows drivers.

My money is on simply faster microarchitecture on the simpler chipset. (did it also come later?)

Not having sample boards I have no way of investigating, nor am I interested given general Intel antics lately (ECC only with Xeon and on some boards? Time to try AMD again).