ASUS Sabertooth 990FX Motherboard Review

Network Throughput Testing

The Gigabit PCIe Ethernet controllers is the same on each of the boards, so unless something is implemented wrong the performance should nearly be the same.

• ASUS Sabertooth 990FX – Realtek 8111E Gigabit LAN Controller
• MSI 990FXA-GD80 – Realtek 8111E Gigabit LAN Controller
• ASRock 890FX Deluxe4 – 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: Total throughput of the ASUS Sabertooth 990FX, MSI 990FXA-GD80 and the ASRock 890FX Deluxe4 total network throughput varied by only ~1.1MB/s. That type of difference isn’t going to affect the day to day performance. The CPU usage of the ASUS Sabertooth 990FX was only 3.7% which is pretty low compared to the almost 9% of the ASRock 890FX Deluxe4.