Sapphire Pure Black X58 Motherboard Review

Sapphire Pure Black X58 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.

• 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: The Sapphire Pure Black X58 motherboard is one of only two boards that isn’t using the Realtek 8111E Ethernet controller. The other motherboard using a different Ethernet controller is the ASUS P8P67 Deluxe which uses the Intel 82579 Gigabit LAN Controller, while our Sapphire Pure Black X58 motherboard is using a Marvell 88E8057 PCI-Express Gigabit LAN. The Sapphire Pure Black X58 had a slightly lower network throughput than the boards using the Realtek 8111E controller ~3MB/s and slightly higher network throughput than the ASUS P8P67 Deluxe by ~4MB/s. The CPU usage of the Marvell 88E8057 was the lowest of any of our boards, and significantly lower than the boards using the Realtek 8111E.