Abit's SE6 and BX133-RAID
The Intel PC133 BX versus i815 - Where the rubber meets the road.

By Dave "Davo" Altavilla
7/30/00

 
Hot Hardware's Test Systems
One driven by the ol' BX and the other by the new kid on the block, the i815.

LiteOn Mid Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Pentium III 933EB,  Abit SE6 i815 Motherboard and Abit BX133-RAID i440BX Motherboard, 128MB of PC133 True CAS2 SDRAM from Corsair (thanks Outside Loop), Dual IBM 15Gig 7200 RPM ATA100 Hard Drives (thanks again Outside Loop), Elsa Gladiac GeForce2 GTS AGP Graphics Card , Kenwood 72X CDROM, Win 98SE, DirectX 7.0a

Head-to-Head / Performance Progression
Where the rubber meets the road... BX versus i815

Winbench 99 from Ziff Davis does a nice job of breaking down various levels of performance in CPU, Hard Drive System and various other aspects of each subsystem in a given configuration.  We set up the BX133 in both ATA100 and RAID 0 Mode.  The SE6 was also paired with an ATA100 drive of the same make and model.  Each of the drives used was partitioned and formatted but left totally free of data.  The test drive setting within Winbench 99 was set to the empty ATA100 drives and run from identical host drives in each system.  This set up a very level playing field for all of the tests.

(click for viewing)

While the CPU and FPU scores are pretty much on par, the Hard Drive subsystem scores show the BX133-RAID absolutely man-handling the SE6.  The Striping RAID setup on the BX133 scored THE best drive benchmarks we have ever seen here in the lab on any processor at any speed.  Even the single channel ATA100 scores on the High Point Controller of the BX133, show its supremacy be far in almost every drive benchmark when compared to the i815 driven SE6.  Intel may have some work to do yet on their Ultra ATA100 drivers.  CPU utilization was extremely low in all configurations with the RAID 0 set up being the lowest, surprisingly.

Since we are looking at drive performance, let's break it down further for you.  All scores taken at 933MHz.

SiSoft Sandra Hard Drive Benchmarks

Drive Bench BX133 ATA100

Drive Bench SE6 ATA100

Drive Bench BX133 RAID O Mode

 
The SE6 stands proud versus the BX133 with a single ATA100 drive.  However, this is a synthetic benchmark and it is very different from a "real world" application benchmark like Winbench 99.  Sandra seems to rely heavily on disk access times and the i815 seems more nimble with this.  However, the BX133-RAID in RAID Mode 0, totally obliterates the i815.  That was to be expected with the RAID set up and two fast ATA100 drives.

Let's check those scores one more way with Hard Drive Tach.  All scores taken at 933MHz.

Hard Drive Tach SE6 ATA100

Hard Drive Tach BX133 ATA100

Hard Drive Tach BX133 RAID Mode 0

HD Tach is showing its age and in all tests the Read Burst Speed is pegged at 80MB/Sec.  What is more interesting is that the High Point Controller on the BX133-RAID shows lower CPU utilization and slightly higher performance than the i815's integrated solution.  In addition, once again the RAID Mode 0 set up smokes the rest of the field.

Let's have some gaming fun with the SE6 and BX133 and then call it a day, shall we?  

Quake 3 Arena Performance and The Ratings