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Performance

To measure real world performance, we choose to measure the time it takes for a game to load a level. We choose three games for this test - F.E.A.R, Quake 4 and Serious Sam II. Because of the way the games work (caching some elements in RAM and virtual memory), we ran test for both first time load and reloads. We restart the computer after each first time load, clearing the RAM and virtual memory from any game data. Reloads or consecutive loads are done consecutively - in F.E.A.R and Quake 4, we load another level before reloading the first chapter. In Serious Sam, we reload the game directly after finishing one test run.

We chose both F.E.A.R's and Quake 4's opening cinematic simply because these levels are generally much larger than the average levels for both games. For Serious Sam II, we choose the final Mental Institution level for the same reason. Measurements are taken with FRAPS, from the time the game starts loading the level to the start of the cinematic sequence. Since we're measuring load times, the performance metric is time (in msec).

We also perform another additional test for this round up. We made an ISO image of a Company of Heroes DVD, copying into the first and second drive in a single drive configuration and the RAID 0 stripe in RAID configuration. We mounted the ISO, installed the game and record the time taken for the game to install itselt to the hard drive. The tests were perform three times, from which we then compute an average. By placing the ISO in the same drive (and in the same RAID 0 stripe) as the system, we're testing the I/O performance of the drive, forcing the drive to always swtich between reading the ISO and writing the game data. By placing the ISO on the second drive, we basically testing file copy performance - one drive reads while the another (the system drive) writes. From this test, we can basically see the 'burden' of using RAID 0.

We'd like to thank Tagan for supplying the additional power supply and Gigabyte for supplying both the Gigabyte P965-DS3P and Radeon X1950 Pro for this article.

Our test setup
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 socket LGA-775
4 x 512 MB A-DATA Vitesta 5-5-5-18 PC6400 DDR2-SDRAM
Gigabyte Radeon X1950 Pro 256 MB graphics card
Gigabyte P965-DS3P Intel P965 motherboard
LiteOn 1673S DVD-RW
Tagan TG530-U15 530 watts ATX/BTX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
ATI Catalyst 7.2 reference driver
Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility 8.1.0.1006
DirectX 9.0c
all respected games used for benchmarks have been updated to their latest,final builds.

The graphs are pretty self explanatory, but in case you can't see the text, they're arranged in groups of three colors: green for the first run,  blue for the second and red for the third (final) run. Results in black are the average of three runs. The purpose of including all three runs is to see how much variability these test have. Results are in milliseconds, sp 25821 means 25.821 seconds, so shorter bars means better performance. We'll take a look at 80 GB drives first, then 160 GB drives later on.

The results:

Single drive configuration first. It's easy to see, the Caviar SE 80 GB has the upper hand here. On average, we save 3 seconds with the Caviar than if we were to use the Deskstar and 11 seconds if we were to use the Barracuda 7200.9. However, the Deskstar is the stronger performer with reloads - around 3 seconds faster than both Barracuda 7200.9 and Caviar SE.

With RAID 0, the Deskstar and Caviar SE are neck to neck from the get go, the Deskstar is faster by 1.5 seconds on average.  The Caviar regain the lead when you reload - it's faster by 0.7 to 0.8 seconds, with much more consistent results. The Barracuda 7200.9 simply can't catch up to the competition, its 8 to 9 seconds slower than the other two drives on first loads and about 1.4 to 2.7 seconds on reloads. Not surprisingly really, since we saw earlier sequential read performance is not one of Barracuda's strong points.

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