Raptor speed in HD Tach

[Godmachine]

for a odd reason when i recently changed out my motherboard (MSI K8T Neo) i got the Abit-KV8-Max3 it rocks and such but the question is when i switched from a silicon image Serial ata onboard channel to Via's onboard channel my HD Tach score went up like 80 megs to 180 megs on burst bandwith ...and before it was only 105 .. is this correct?? i mean 80 megs difference by just switching from silicon's channel to Via's?? ..i also heard that the VIA Serial ata controller has like 533MB's of bandwith ..is this also true?

[felix88]

the Silicon Image controller was using your PCI bus, so it was limited to 133MB/s minus any overhead(so 105MB/s is probably about right). the onboard SATA on the VIA chipset doesn't have to deal with this limitation so you should see about 120-130MB/s.

but something isn't measuing correctly, because the SATA is limited to 150MB/s. maybe some sort of caching is going on?

[Godmachine]

From what i heard the VIA Serial ATA is truly a hardware raid controller vs silicon image or promises software raid controllers .. meaning hardware as in using some of the main system ram to precache data like a true raid card with onboard memory would do ..also uses less CPU cycles to gain better throughput ..not sure how but its damn well a sweet controller i would recommend anyone thinking of getting a board with a VIA Serial ata onboard go for it

[felix88]

so, are you running RAID? you didn't mention that in your first post.

anyway, it sounds like a nice improvement. it's always nice to find "free" preformance hidden somewhere. :D