With all the fanfare surrounding SATA, you'd think it would be faster than good old UltraATA/IDE. As far as the physical connections between drive and MB, it most certainly is. But as a protocol for accessing your drives, it turns out to be a wash, at least for regular users.
At issue here is that the M4A77TD, as well as most modern motherboards offer a setting in the BIOS to control how your OS accesses the hard drives: IDE (the good old days standard), RAID (required if you want to join your drives in a RAID setup), or ACHI (the new, 'better', kid on the block). Only IDE is supported out of the box by older OSes (such as the ever popular WindowsXP). Using the other two requires a bit more work during OS install. Is that worth it? Maybe not!
How I tested: my main OS was on a SATA drive, set to IDE mode. This was not easy to toggle back and forth, so I left it in IDE mode for all tests. Instead, I changed the mode of my second hard drive, a 500GB SAMSUNG HD501LJ, rebooting between each test.
Here are the tests I ran:
Windows Bootup (in seconds)
AHCI: 52
RAID: 61
IDE: 44
Note that since the OS was always accessed under IDE, this is not really a test of hard drive performance. Rather, it shows the overhead (BIOS, and windows) of loading the ACHI or RAID drivers. IDE wins by a landslide.
Next, the ever popular HD Tune:
ACHI:
Transfer Rate Minimum : 38.7 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 82.8 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 64.7 MB/sec
Access Time : 14.2 ms
Burst Rate : 133.2 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 3.7%
RAID:
Transfer Rate Minimum : 38.8 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 82.8 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 64.8 MB/sec
Access Time : 14.2 ms
Burst Rate : 128.9 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 3.9%
IDE:
Transfer Rate Minimum : 39.0 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 82.2 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 64.7 MB/sec
Access Time : 14.2 ms
Burst Rate : 131.0 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 3.3%
Looks like a dead heat, in that you'll never notice these small differences, at least in real-world performance. Not like the bootup speed, which is measured in actual whole percentage point differences. What this should drive home is that drives are slow, and how you access them doesn't matter much in terms of throughput. so loading a large photo into Photoshop is going to take the same amount of time no matter what BIOS setting you use. That is,unless you want to install two drives, and set up RAID stripping. That's the sort of change that actually makes a difference, but it's not free, and has the distinct downside that if one drive dies, you loose the data on both drives.
Note that these tests don't really exercise ACHI in the way that it is supposed to shine, which is with multiple concurrent accesses to the hard drive. Of course, in real life, you won't see that much. Here's one situation where you will: zipping up a large folder on a relatively fragmented drive. You've got lots of file reads, and lots of writes, heavily interleaved. Is there any difference in performance here? To really test this, I zipped up a multi-gig directory, using "store only" for the zip compression, so that disk throughput would be the main limiter. Interestingly, though I rebooted after each test, and removed the zip file as well, performance was quite varied, even with the same setting I ran each test 3 times). Times are in seconds, sorted quickest to slowest.
AHCI: 585, 591, 594
RAID: 586, 601, 606
IDE: 585, 601, 608
Here we being to see some evidence that AHCI could be faster. While each setting had nearly identical fastest speeds (suggesting that by random chance the order of reads and writes were more or less optimal on those runs), RAID and IDE were noticeably slower on their less optimal runs. I say notably slower, but we are talking at best a 2.3% speed up between the slowest IDE and the slowest ACHI. So perhaps on a server, you might find an advantage to using AHCI. Meanwhile, on a desktop machine, you'll likely spend more time waiting for boot-up under AHCI than you ever will gain back on those marathon ZIPing sessions. Unless you really like compression.
Notes: I used the 2.55 AHCI driver, AMD's RAID driver, and the stock WinXpSP3 IDE drivers.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
M4a77TD audio review: VT1708S High Definition sound card
Built into the ASUS M4a77TD motherboard is a 8 channel sound card using a VIA chipset (VT1708S). It supports up to 8 speakers, microphone, and line in.
Audio playback is nice an clean, with zero background hiss/hum while music is playing back. Due to aggressive power saving mechanisms (the VT1708S is also meant to be used in laptops), if no sounds play for a couple minutes it shuts off power to the speakers, resulting in a loud hum/hiss. This is fixed immediately by playing some music, adjusting the mixer volume, etc, but is super annoying. There is an easy work-around, however: use the Windows volume control (sndvol32.exe) to mix in just a little bit of sound from MIC or Line In to the output. The sound card doesn't check to see if any actual sound is playing on Line in/MIC, but assumes that there could be and shuts off power saving. I could only figure out how to do this with the Windows Volume control - the VIA mixer (HD Audio Dec) doesn't seem to expose this functionality (edit: it does - click the button below the volume slider to un-mute, and the white arrow at the lower right to show line in, etc.).
The VIA mixer/control panel is ugly, but usable. It attempts to look cool by visually modeling itself on a stereo, but just manages to look clunky and reduce usability. It does allow you to control the sound card's built in equalizer, which might be useful if you don't have a stereo and just plug the output into a cheap set of PC speakers.
It also offers a set of customizable hot keys to increase/decrease volume, or mute, in case your keyboard doesn't have that built in.
Meanwhile, the software takes ~14MB of RAM, and 32MB on disk. What a hog. SndVol32, in comparison, uses just 3.5MB. And keep in mind Microsoft isn't exactly known for efficient coding.
Recording ability is miserable. The MIC amplifier (even with "MIC BOOST" turned on) is way too weak, even when using a reasonably good quality $25 radio shack hand held mic. The frequency response isn't too good as well. The high frequencies are quite attenuated, even when recording a painfully loud, high pitched bell. The sound card does better recording from itself - if you set the audio input to stereo mix, and max the volume of every knob you can find (output and input) then you can get 45% of the dynamic range possible with a 16 bit recording. Which is to say, still not very good, but usable in a pinch. The frequency response appears to be fine in this mode - the recording is quiet, but not distorted.
You wouldn't buy this MB expecting to set up a home studio, obviously. But it is not too much to expect that your MB would be good enough to use with Skype. This does not seem to be the case. Very disappointing.
You might think that you could just slap in any old PCI sound card to rectify this problem - like an old Sound Blaster Live, but keep in mind that the PCI slots all use shared IRQs, so pick your sound card with care (the sound blaster live does not work in this MB).
Audio playback is nice an clean, with zero background hiss/hum while music is playing back. Due to aggressive power saving mechanisms (the VT1708S is also meant to be used in laptops), if no sounds play for a couple minutes it shuts off power to the speakers, resulting in a loud hum/hiss. This is fixed immediately by playing some music, adjusting the mixer volume, etc, but is super annoying. There is an easy work-around, however: use the Windows volume control (sndvol32.exe) to mix in just a little bit of sound from MIC or Line In to the output. The sound card doesn't check to see if any actual sound is playing on Line in/MIC, but assumes that there could be and shuts off power saving. I could only figure out how to do this with the Windows Volume control - the VIA mixer (HD Audio Dec) doesn't seem to expose this functionality (edit: it does - click the button below the volume slider to un-mute, and the white arrow at the lower right to show line in, etc.).
It also offers a set of customizable hot keys to increase/decrease volume, or mute, in case your keyboard doesn't have that built in.
Meanwhile, the software takes ~14MB of RAM, and 32MB on disk. What a hog. SndVol32, in comparison, uses just 3.5MB. And keep in mind Microsoft isn't exactly known for efficient coding.
Recording ability is miserable. The MIC amplifier (even with "MIC BOOST" turned on) is way too weak, even when using a reasonably good quality $25 radio shack hand held mic. The frequency response isn't too good as well. The high frequencies are quite attenuated, even when recording a painfully loud, high pitched bell. The sound card does better recording from itself - if you set the audio input to stereo mix, and max the volume of every knob you can find (output and input) then you can get 45% of the dynamic range possible with a 16 bit recording. Which is to say, still not very good, but usable in a pinch. The frequency response appears to be fine in this mode - the recording is quiet, but not distorted.
You wouldn't buy this MB expecting to set up a home studio, obviously. But it is not too much to expect that your MB would be good enough to use with Skype. This does not seem to be the case. Very disappointing.
You might think that you could just slap in any old PCI sound card to rectify this problem - like an old Sound Blaster Live, but keep in mind that the PCI slots all use shared IRQs, so pick your sound card with care (the sound blaster live does not work in this MB).
Thursday, May 20, 2010
(in) compatibility with the M4A77TD motherboard
To date, I have found the following hardware to be incompatible with the M4A77TD.
All PCI slots use shared IRQs, which means some older add in cards do not work:
All PCI slots use shared IRQs, which means some older add in cards do not work:
- Sound Blaster Live
- Paradise Ultra 66 IDE controller
- Windows XP SP3 slip-streamed (The slip-streaming was done at work, so I don't know exactly how they did it - but the disk boot just fine in every other computer I've tried it in). Note that a regular WinXPSP3 CD (from MSDN) works fine.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
More IDE hard drives for the M4A77TD
The M4a77TD only supports two IDE devices. I had planned to extend that significantly with an old Paradise66 IDE PCI card, but it turns out that card is not compatible with the motherboard - I suspect because all of the PCI slots use shared IRQs. What a pain. A cheap alternative can be found at DealExtreme who sells a IDE drive to SATA plug adapter for only $4.17, with shipping and handling. Yes, you loose one SATA port, but with 6 ports, I'm not crying too hard.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
ASUS M4A77TD review: included software: PC Probe 2
PC Probe is an optional install that reports various details about your computer's configuration, and realtime stats such as temperature.
The configuration details include things like what version your BIOS is, and what add-on peripherals are installed. The realtime stats are more interesting - MB temperature, fan speed, voltages.
PC Probe can display this information in a set of small always on top windows that are 110x400 pixels when all grouped together. The visual presentation emphasizes style over readability, however, with a fake LED font.
PC Probe can also be set to raise an alarm if any of the values go outside of safe operating range. For this, and the real-time stats display, you will loose about 10MB of RAM, and another 13MB of page file.
The configuration details include things like what version your BIOS is, and what add-on peripherals are installed. The realtime stats are more interesting - MB temperature, fan speed, voltages.
PC Probe can display this information in a set of small always on top windows that are 110x400 pixels when all grouped together. The visual presentation emphasizes style over readability, however, with a fake LED font.
PC Probe can also be set to raise an alarm if any of the values go outside of safe operating range. For this, and the real-time stats display, you will loose about 10MB of RAM, and another 13MB of page file.
M4A77TD BIOS 2007 released 4-22-2010
A new bios is out, ver 2007, and I am currently testing it. It seems to work well, and, in particular, has better support for my Crucial DDR3 1333 (previously, under bios 306, the MB was unstable unless the RAM ran at 1066).
ASUS M4A77TD Specs: straight from ASUS.com
Because ASUS decided to make a 100% Google incompatible website:
Specifications
| CPU | AMD Socket AM3 ;Phenom™II /Athlon™II /Sempron™ 100 Series Processors AMD 140W CPU Support AMD Cool 'n' Quiet™ 2.0 Technology (by CPU type) Support 45nm CPU *Refer to www.asus.com for the AMD CPU support list |
| Chipset | AMD 770/SB710 |
| System Bus | Up to 5200 MT/s ; HyperTransport™ 3.0 interface |
| Memory | 4 x DIMM, Max. 16 GB, DDR3 1800(O.C.)/1600(O.C.)/1333/1066 ECC,Non-ECC,Un-buffered Memory Dual Channel memory architecture *AMD AM3 100 and 200 series CPU support up to DDR3 1066MHz. **Due to OS limitation, when installing total memory of 4GB capacity or more, Windows® 32-bit operation system may only recognize less than 3GB. Install a 64-bit WindowsWindows® OS when you want to install 4GB or more memory on the motherboard. Please refer to www.asus.com or user manual for Memory QVL. |
| Expansion Slots | 1 x PCIe 2.0 x16 2 x PCIe x1 3 x PCI |
| Storage | SB710 Chipset 1 xUltraDMA 133/100 6 xSATA 3 Gb/s ports Support RAID 0,1,10,JBOD |
| LAN | RTL8112L PCIe Gigabit LAN controller featuring AI NET2 |
| Audio | VT1708S High Definition Audio 8-Channel CODEC - Supports Jack-detect and Multistreaming teconologies, and Front Panel Jack-Retasking - Optical S/PDIF Out ports at back I/O |
| USB | 12 USB 2.0/1.1 ports (6 ports at mid-board, 6 ports at back panel) |
| ASUS Unique Features | - ASUS EPU-4 Engine - ASUS Express Gate - ASUS Turbo Key - ASUS Q-Fan - ASUS CrashFree BIOS 3 - ASUS EZ Flash 2 - ASUS MyLogo 2 - ASUS AI NET 2 |
| Overclocking Features | Intelligent overclocking tools - ASUS Turbo Key SFS (Stepless Frequency Selection) - FSB tuning from 200 MHz up to 550MHz at 1MHz increment - PCI Express frequency tuning from 100MHz up to 150MHz at 1MHz increment Overclocking Protection - ASUS C.P.R.(CPU Parameter Recall) |
| Special Features | 100% All High-quality Conductive Polymer Capacitors |
| Back Panel I/O Ports | 1 x PS/2 Keyboard/Mouse Combo port 1 x S/PDIF Out (Optical) 1 x LAN(RJ45) port 1 x COM port 1 x LPT 6 x USB 2.0/1.1 8-channel Audio port |
| Internal I/O Connectors | 3 x USB connectors supports additional 6 USB 2.0 ports 1 x IDE connector 6 x SATA connectors 1 x S/PDIF Out connector 1 x CPU / 1 x Chassis Fan connectors 1 x System Panel connector 1 x High Definition Front panel audio connector 1 x 24-pin EATX power connector 1 x 4-pin ATX 12V Power connector |
| BIOS | 8 Mb Flash ROM AMI BIOS, PnP, DMI v2.0, WfM2.0, ACPI v2.0a, SMBIOS 2.5 |
| Accessories | User's manual 1 x I/O Shield 1 x UltraDMA 133/100/66 cable 2 x SATA cable(s) |
| Support Disc | Drivers ASUS PC Probe II Express Gate Anti-virus software (OEM version) ASUS Update |
| Form Factor | ATX Form Factor 12 inch x 8.4 inch ( 30.5 cm x 21.3 cm ) |
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