Those eight SATA ports on the
P5E64 WS Evolution aren’t just for bragging
rights. Unlike general-purpose or gaming rigs,
Workstations typically need to use multiple
hard drives in various RAID configurations,
especially if they’re configured for video editing,
3D content creation, CAD or pre-press publication
development. A workstation that specializes in
extensive Photoshop projects for example, might use
a pair of Raptors—one for the OS and the other for
Photoshop programs and utilities with a windows
paging file on each drive (or a pair in RAID 1 for
the OS and apps). Another pair of RAID 0
Raptors might be used as a “scratch” volume for
processing temp and work files, with three 500 – 750
GB drives configured in RAID 5 for saving data. With that in mind, I took the four
Maxtor 250GB drives and benched them on the ASUS
P5E64 WS Evolution in the
following RAID configurations:
So, let's take a look at the results.
Performance and CPU Utilization
levels are what you would expect between the
different RAID configurations. RAID 0 is obviously
the best choice for speed—even better with 4 disks
stripped together. What you gain in speed you lose
in security as RAID 0 offers no redundancy. Lose a
disk—lose your data, and the potential for that
happening is doubled when you go from a two to four
disk RAID 0 set-up. Either use the striped drives
for a temp/scratch disk, which would be ideal for
applications that
really crank-out a lot of temporary or swap files—or do
frequent backups of the stripped volume. RAID 1 is
ideal for the primary boot drive containing the OS
and your programs, as you won't be dead in the water
if one of the drives fail. You'll take a hit in
capacity and disk performance in exchange for the
extra security. Which is worth it when you suddenly
hear that high-pitched metallic grinding sound in
the middle of a major project at 4 A.M. in the
morning...
RAID 10 (also known as RAID 0+1)
offers a good balance between redundancy and disk
performance. The only real drawback is that you need
four hard drives to make it work. With the
price of hard drives being what they are today,
that's not that much of a drawback, though. For the
ultimate in security and performance, RAID 5 can't
be beat. It's not as fast as RAID 10 and you lose
some capacity and a bit of write performance, but you
can get away with using just three disks to set it up.
PdnBench for Paint.NET v3.20
Paint.NET
is a free, open-source image and photo editing
program that began life as an undergraduate
college senior design project under the guidance of
Microsoft. Paint.NET was originally slated as a
replacement for Microsoft Paint, which has been part
of the Windows operating system since its inception.
Easy to use but surprisingly powerful with features
that rival commercial applications such as Adobe
Photoshop, Corel Paint Shop Pro and
another popular open-source photo editor—The
GIMP—you can extend Paint.NET’s functionality and power with
plug-ins. Support is provided by
online tutorials
and Paint.NET's
online community.
Multithreaded,
multi-processor and multi-core aware, Paint.NET supports
both 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows XP and Vista.
The
PdnBench for Paint.NET
benchmark for Paint.NET compares performance
between different processors and systems. Like
Paint.NET, PdnBench is multithread-capable, supports
multiple processors, multi-core processors, and
32/64-bit editions of XP and Vista. Run from the
command line as a batch file, PdnBench times in
milliseconds how long it takes to perform a number
of image manipulation tasks from simple to
complex, then presents a final score in milliseconds at
the end of the benchmark.
The ASUS P5E64 WS Evolution's
workstation pedigree, not to mention the
X.M.P.-pumped memory and X48 chipset, gives it a
clear advantage in photo and image processing tasks
over the P5K PRO with its P35 chipset and
DDR2 RAM.
Iometer
Iometer is
an open-source benchmark for stress-testing and
measuring the performance of PC I/O subsystems.
Backups, downloading music, drivers, patches, the
latest game demos and mods can chew up a lot of hard
drive real estate in a hurry. Which is why it’s
great to have a Network Attached Storage Device—or
NAS—to store it all. Naturally, you want data
transfers to and from your NAS to go as quickly and
smoothly as possible. Iometer is a great tool for
measuring the throughput performance of sequential
reads and writes to a network drive.
I used Iometer to create a 1GB test file to a drive
mapped to a share on my
ReadyNAS
NV+, measuring the throughput of the file
creation process over the network. Details on how
Iometer was configured for the test is available at
Netgear’s ReadyNAS Community Support Forum
here. I ran
two sets of benchmarks: one for the Marvell 88E8056
PCIe controller, the other for the Marvell 88E8001
PCI controller.
The Marvell 88E8056 PCI-E Gigabit
Ethernet Controller clearly has an advantage over the Marvel
888E8001 PCI controller. As both the P5E64 WS
Evolution and P5K PRO have the same 88E8056 controller,
it's not much of a surprise that their scores for
this benchmark are so close together.
Now let's see how well the P5E64 WS
Evolution does with games.
Call of Duty IV: Modern Warfare
Famous for their award-winning, WWII
Call of Duty games with intelligent AI squad
mates that fight alongside you and enemies who are
equally as skilled in fighting against you,
Infinity Ward jumps into a more contemporary
conflict in
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
. In Call of Duty
4, you assume the roles of Sgt. “Soap” MacTavish
of the British 22nd S.A.S. (Special Air Service)
Regiment, and Marine Corps Sgt. Paul Jackson
of the 1st Force Recon Battalion. A
compelling, dramatic storyline with more than a few
surprising twists and turns, visuals that can give
many DirectX 10 titles under Windows Vista a good
run for the money, and some of the most enveloping
and intense combat seen in a first-person shooter,
made Call of Duty 4 one of the best games released
in 2007.
I used FRAPS to record my
run-through of the “Crew Expendable” level at
the beginning of the game where MacTavish and his
SAS team board an Estonian freighter during a stormy
night at sea that is transporting nuclear materials
to an outlaw Middle-East regime. Your mission:
neutralize the crew and seize those materials. Crew
Expendable involves intense, close-quarters combat
with multiple enemies within the confines of the
ship’s narrow corridors and cramped, maze-like cargo
hold under a wide range of outdoor night-time and
indoor lighting.
The next run-through is the
“War Pig” level where Sgt. Jackson and the
Marines escort a repaired M1-Abrams tank to the
rendezvous point for a final assault against the
leader of the aforementioned outlaw regime. Chaotic
battles in the streets and brutal close-quarters
house-to-house combat with plenty of explosions,
smoke and particle effects from RPGs, tank fire and
bullets doing some major environmental
damage, are the hallmark of this level.
The P5E64 WS Evolution edged
out the P5K PRO by roughly three frames per second
for both the War Pig and Crew Expendable levels.
Hardly earth-shattering by any stretch of the
imagination. Still, a win is a win...
Crysis
Clearly one of the most highly
anticipated first-person shooters ever developed
exclusively for the PC,
Crysis is a
next-generation technological marvel with incredible
visuals designed as a showcase for Windows Vista’s
DirectX 10. Crysis features real-world environmental and physics
effects, and white-hot combat, pitting the player
against challenging and resourceful human and alien
enemies where you must constantly adapt your
weapons, tactics and Nanosuit battle armor to
survive.
Crysis is also one of the most
hardware-intensive games in existence, capable of
dragging the performance of the most powerful rigs
to a near standstill—especially under Windows Vista
at high resolutions with antialiasing enabled and
all the visuals pushed to the extreme.
I used
HardwareOC’s Crysis Benchmark for Crysis.
Crytek’s Built-in Island demo and a custom
demo of the Core level recorded by Hardware
OC, was used to obtain the video portion of the
benchmark scores. For the CPU scores, HardwareOC
uses the Island and Ice demos built
into the game. Antialiasing was disabled, but 16x
anisotropic filtering was enabled. The frame
rate-killing Boost Renderer option of the
utility was not used. Hardware OC’s Crysis Benchmark
reports minimum, average and maximum frame rates.
Since the average frame rate is what you can expect
to see the majority of the time you’re playing a
game, that’s what I presented here. I ran the
High and Medium detail benchmarks, since
those are the only two detail levels that are
actually playable on hardware currently
available.
Well, Crysis certainly seems to like
the extra room to stretch its legs provided by
OCZ's X.M.P.-enhanced DDR3 memory with its
performance profile's faster, tighter timings and
command rate. No doubt the added performance of the
ASUS P5E 64 WS Evolution's X48 chipset is
contributing as well. This resource-hungry
next-generation game clearly needs next-generation
hardware to gain any truly measurable performance.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
id Software’s team-based tactical
shooter, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars allows
you to play as one of five character classes as a
member of Earth’s GDF (Global Defense Force)
or the alien Strog invaders in Objective,
Stopwatch and Campaign modes online, or
offline with A.I. combatants.
Hardware OC’s Enemy Territory: Quake
Wars Benchmark's, High
Quality setting, along with 4x antialiasing
and 16x anisotropic filtering were enabled.
Hardware OC’s custom Outskirts, Canyon and
Quarry demos were used to record the performance
scores. Since both motherboards in the test are
running Windows Vista, the Windows XP-only HOC
Salvage demo was not used.
The P5E64 WS Evolution shows
its mettle once again pulling 5 frames per second
ahead of the P5K PRO on the "Quarry" level; 8 on
"Outskirts," and 6 on "Canyon."
