AMD's 785G Chipset - Revolutionary or Evolutionary?

Disk Performance –

PCMark Vantage -

We utilize the PCMark Vantage disk performance tests on a regular basis as they provide a general indication to actual desktop performance with various storage devices. Our test results today concentrate on the total suite score and results from the application loading benchmark.

Even though the ICH7 is feature limited, it still maintains to lead the SB710/SB750 Southbridges in our Vantage performance tests. The total suite score favors the ICH7 by 2% while the application loading test suite indicates the SB710 is about 6% slower in this particular benchmark that reflects most SOHO usage patterns.

The latest AMD SSD tuned SB driver increased our total suite score from 16432 to 24653 and the application loading score from 59.1MB/s to 83.7 MB/s compared to the inbox Windows 7 driver. We did not notice any performance differences between the inbox Intel driver and the latest driver update from Intel. That said, the AMD driver properly disabled Prefetch, Indexing, and Defrag on our SSD while the Intel driver left these items enabled on the ICH7 system.

Transfer Tests -

In these two particular tests, we are concentrating on transfer throughput from our WD 300GB VelociRaptor to our 80GB Kingston SSD (Intel X25-M) SSD. Our first test consists of transferring a folder that is 2.31GB in size and contains our 35 test videos. The second test consists of a folder that is 1.08GB in size and contains 2454 files of various documents and images.

In the large file test, the ICH7 is about 13% quicker than the SB710. The small file transfer test has the ICH7 retaining a 14% lead over the SB710. Regarding both results, we never noticed the AMD system being slower than the Intel system in daily usage.

USB Performance -

AMD rightly took a lot of blame for poor USB performance in the SB450/SB600 Southbridges and set off to correct these problems in the latest SB7xx series. For the most part they have succeeded. However, we discovered that utilizing HDTach or similar programs showed that AMD was still a step behind Intel and NVIDIA although this is something we never noticed in daily usage.

Our two USB transfer tests focus on file transfers from our SSD OS drive and our secondary HD to an external 1TB unit from Lacie. The first test consists of transferring a folder that is 954MB in size and contains 28 various files ranging from short videos to PDF files. The second test consists of a folder that is 1.08GB in size and contains 2454 files of various documents and images.

In the first test, the SB710 is 7% quicker than the ICH7. Our second transfer test indicates the SB710 is 4% faster than the ICH7.