GIGABYTE G1.SNIPER2 Intel Z68 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.

• GIGABYTE G1.SNIPER2 – Bigfoot Networks Killer E2100 Gigabit LAN Controller
• ASUS ROG Maximus IV Extreme-Z -1 x Intel 82579, 1 x Intel 82583V Gigabit LAN Controller
• ASUS Maximus IV Gene-Z – 1 x Intel 82579 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 2600k system with an ASUS P8Z68-V Pro 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: I’m going to have to admit that I’m not horribly impressed with the network performance of the GIGABYTE G1.SNIPER2. The Bigfoot Networks Killer E2100 had triple the CPU usage of the ASUS Maximus IV Extreme-Z and more than four times that of the Gene-Z! The actual throughput fell right into the middle of the pack with 941.574MB/s.

The Bigfoot Networks Killer E2100 is supposed to offload the CPU load to the NPU (Network Processing Unit) to free up the CPU resources for you gaming. Curious about this, I opened up the NPU monitor in the Killer E2100 Software suite and found that it is loading up the NPU as well as the CPU. Granted this is one test out of all the applications that will use the NIC, but I’m not impressed.