Hard Drive Performance

Finally, I wanted to see how well the 686B south bridge was coping with the very fast 7,200 RPM ATA/100 hard drive from Western Digital I was using. Sandra's hard drive test resulted in a score of 21092.

This absolutely blows away scores I'd seen with this exact same drive on other motherboards with the 686B south bridge. I have heard that there can be great variance in performance from individual VIA chips, so it is difficult to say whether I got a chipset from a very good week/fab, or if ASUS has just done an impeccable job with the A7V133. In any case, a run of HD Tach backed up these results:

Next I decided to check ATA100 performance on the Promise controller. Fortunately I encountered no problems when merely switching the current drive over to the chip's primary IDE port. The Sandra tests revealed performance just a hair better than the 686B's:

But look at the HD Tach results:

Whereas on the 686B, the drive had started out above 30,000 KB/s it immediately dropped down to 25,000 and make a quick dive around the 5.38 mark, on the Promise channel, it remained at a pretty constant 25,000. Also, the Promise's random access time is marginally better, and its read burst speed is significantly better. In the future, I think I'll leave the hard drive here (despite the extra 1.3% CPU utilization) and keep the CD-RW on the native channel.