MSI P67A-GD65 Intel Socket 1155 Motherboard Performance 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 boards uses a different Gigabit Controller. Let’s take a look at what controller is on each of the boards.

• 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: The MSI P67A-GD65 uses the same Realtek 8111E controller as the ASUS P8P67 and the ECS P55H-AK, all three of these boards had very comparable performance. The ASUS P8P67 Deluxe uses ~60% less CPU power using the Intel 82579 Gigabit LAN Controller, the Intel 82579 on the ASUS P8P67 Deluxe does have slightly lower network throughput across the network.