EPoX EP-9U1697-GLi: ULi M1697 Goes Mainstream

Ethernet Performance

The current motherboard test suite includes LAN performance measurements. All of these boards utilize PCI Express controllers with the only difference being the supplier of the core logic.

The Windows 2000 Driver Development Kit (DDK) includes a useful LAN testing utility called NTttcp. We used the NTttcp tool to test Ethernet throughput and the CPU utilization of the various Ethernet Controllers used on the Intel motherboards.

We set up one machine as the server; in this test, an Intel system with an Intel CSA Gigabit LAN connection. Intel CSA has a reputation for providing fast throughput and this seemed a reasonable choice to serve our Gigabit LAN clients.


At the server side, we used the following Command Line as suggested by the VIA whitepaper on LAN testing:

Ntttcpr -m 4 ,0,‹server IP› -a 4 -l 256000 -n 30000

On the client side (the motherboard under test), we used the following Command Line:

Ntttcps -m 4 ,0,‹client IP› -a 4 -l 256000 -n 30000

At the conclusion of the test, we captured the throughput and CPU utilization figures from the client screen.

The M1697 natively supports 10/100Mb/s Ethernet operations, so Epox utilizes the PCI based Realtek RTL8201CL 10/100Mb/s Ethernet PHY for this purpose. ASRock was able to utilize a discreet PCI-E Gigabit solution on their ULi board and we feel that Epox should have followed suit or at least offered a PCI Gigabit Ethernet option on this board model.

Obviously, the performance of the 10/100 Realtek PHY is not competitive with the Gigabit based solutions with an average throughput of 98.9Mb/s. Also rather odd is the CPU usage required for this throughput. Most 100 Mbit connections require very little in the way of CPU time, due to the much lower bandwidth requirements.

All standard Ethernet tests were performed with standard frames and the NVIDIA Active Armor suite disabled unless otherwise noted. Gigabit Ethernet supports Jumbo frames as well and provides a further reduction in CPU overhead.