GIGABYTE Z68X-UD7-B3 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 Z68X-UD7-B3 – 2x Realtek 8111E Gigabit LAN Controller
• ASUS P8Z68-V Pro – Intel 82579, 1 x Gigabit LAN Controller
• GIGABYTE P67A-UD7 – 2x 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 ASUS P8Z68-V Pro uses an Intel 82579 Gigabit LAN controller which tends to have slightly lower throughput and lower CPU usage. Once again, that is the case. The ASUS P8Z68-V Pro had a throughput of 938.058MB/s and a CPU usage of 1.49% while the Realtek 8111E onboard the GIGABYTE Z68X-UD7-B3 had a throughput of 945.711MB/s and a CPU usage more than double that of the P8Z68-V Pro!