MSI 990FXA-GD80 Motherboard Review – AMD 990FX Chipset

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.

• MSI 990FXA-GD80 – Realtek 8111E Gigabit LAN Controller
• ASRock 890FX Deluxe4 – 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: Total throughput of the MSI 990FXA-GD80 and the ASRock 890FX Deluxe4 were only 1MB/s apart. This is expected since they both use the Realtek 8111E Gigabit LAN Controller. The CPU usage of the ASRock 890FX Deluxe4 was higher than the MSI 990FXA-GD80 by 3.5% though.