GIGABYTE 890FXA-UD5 AMD 890FX 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 Socket AM3 boards uses a different Gigabit Controller. Let’s take a look at what controller is on each of the boards.

• GIGABYTE 890FXA-UD5 – Realtek 8111D chip
• GIGABYTE 880GMA-UD2H – Realtek 8111D chip
• MSI 890FXA-GD70 – Realtek 8111DL
• ASUS Crosshair IV Formula – Marvell 8059 Gigabit LAN controller
• ASRock 890GX Extreme3 – Realtek RTL8111E
• Biostar TA890GXB HD – Realtek RTL8111E

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 930 system with an EVGA X58 Tri-SLI 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: All six of the boards that we tested had nearly the same throughput varying by less than .1%. What separates them is the CPU Usage; the ASRock 890GX Extreme3 and the BIOSTAR TA890GXB HD are both using the Realtek RTL8111E Gigabit Ethernet controller and they both utilized ~7.3-7.4% of the available CPU. The ASUS Crosshair IV Formula uses a Marvell 8059 Gigabit Ethernet LAN controller and used only 1.82% of the CPU. The MSI 890FXA-GD70 uses the Realtek PCI-E GbLAN controller 8111DL and uses 4.23% of the CPU’s capacity. The GIGABYTE 890FXA-UD5 and the GIGABYTE 880GMA-UD2H both use the RealTek 8111D Gigabit Ethernet controller and uses between 3% and 4% of the CPU which is slightly less CPU than the BIOSTAR TA890GXB HD and more than the ASUS Crosshair IV Formula, which places the performance of the GIGABYTE 890FXA-UD5 comfortably in the middle of the pack.