BIOSTAR TP67XE Intel LGA 1155 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.

• 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: The BIOSTAR TP67XE utilizes the same Ethernet controller as all of our boards except for the ASUS P8P67 Deluxe. The network throughput for these four boards is nearly identical. Although, we do see a difference in the CPU usage. The BIOSTAR TP67XE uses less of the CPU than all of the boards using the Realtek 8111E Gigabit Ethernet controller except the GIGABYTE P67A-UD4. The only board that uses a different Gigabit Ethernet controller is the ASUS P8P67 Deluxe which is utilizing the Intel 82579 Gigabit LAN Controller. The network throughput was slightly lower with the Intel chip, and so was the CPU usage.