Intel Desktop Extreme DX58SO2 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.

• Intel DX58S02 X58 – Intel 82574L Gigabyte Ethernet Controller
• GIGABYTE G1 Assassin X58 – Bigfoot Networks Killer E2100 Game Networking Platform
• Sapphire Pure Black X58 – Marvell 88E8057 PCI-Express Gigabit LAN
• 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: Intel uses two totally different Gigabit NICs on the DX58S02 motherboard. The first is the Intel 82567LF (LAN Connect Interface) and the second is the Intel 82574L (PCIe v1.1) Gigabit Ethernet controller. We tested on the 82574L as that is the superior of the two ports and after benchmarking on this port we found highest transfer speeds among the Intel X58 Chipset boards and the least CPU usage of all 10 motherboards we have tested here.