ASRock Fatal1ty P67 Professional Motherboard Review

Network Throughput Testing

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.

• ASRock Fatal1ty Professional – Realtek 8111E Gigabit LAN Controller
• GIGABYTE P67A-UD7 – Realtek 8111E Gigabit LAN Controller
• BIOSTAR TP67XE – Realtek 8111E Gigabit LAN Controller
• GIGABYTE P67A-UD4 – Realtek 8111E Gigabit LAN Controller
• ECS P67H2-A Extreme Black – Realtek 8111E Gigabit LAN Controller
• MSI P67A-GD65 – Realtek 8111E Gigabit LAN Controller
• ASUS P8P67 Deluxe – Intel 82579 Gigabit LAN Controller
• ASUS P8P67 – Realtek 8111E Gigabit LAN Controller
• ECS P55H-AK – Realtek 8111E Gigabit LAN Controller

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: ASRock has employed the Realtek 8111E Gigabit Ethernet controller on the ASRock Fatal1ty Professional. This is the same controller that is being used on all but one of the Intel P67 motherboards. This explains the minor variances between the different motherboards. The one board that uses a different NIC is the ASUS P8P67 Deluxe, the P8P67 Deluxe uses the Intel 82579 Gigabit LAN controller. The ASRock Fatal1ty Professional has a higher network throughput than the ASUS P8P67 Deluxe by a small margin, but it also has a higher CPU usage by more than double.