System Set-Up and Software Used

Hardware Suppliers for the Review

Intel EU for the supply of the Mainboards & CPUs shown, Western Digital for the new RE3 Enterprise SATA Hard Discs, AMD for the supply of the notorious FireGL V7700 professional graphics card, Akasa for a majority peripherals required for this review, Crucial Memory for their supply of the exclusive high speed Ballistix memory.   finally but by no means least LSI Logic for the supply of the MegaRAID 8888ELP Raid Card

With the support and help of all the companies involved.   It gives you the reader a new choice on upgrade paths that many of you look for here with the performance ratio’s each system has to provide.  Do not be fooled for one minute that the WD RE3 drives will not be fast.  When we delve deeper into the article you will find just how fast they really are deployed with or without the Raid Card.

Systems Integrators, OEM’s and VAR’s should contact all companies directly for pricing and availability of all components. Members of the public should contact their respective suppliers requesting the parts directly.

Benchmarks and Software Used (32 Bit Mode)

This article has been put together with careful consideration and time most certainly was of the essence to ensure that the results were accurate.  We could have spent days reproducing many types of results but all would be lost within the actual meaning of the Raid Cards performance (as too the hard drives) and the plethora of benchmarks available in this arena; one could spend all day in producing results if the time permitted, paralysis by analysis!  It was therefore decided that we utilised many of the common benchmarks known to us all, a few professional benchmarks and applications.  This would most certainly push the Raid Card and new RE3 Drives through the mill and see how its overall performance would be; though its outcome no matter how basic is factual.

Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP3
HD Tach 3.0.4.0 Journalists Edition
HD Tune 3.10 Benchmark
ATTO Benchmark
Everest Benchmark
PCMark 2005 Advanced
Cinebench 10
SiSoftware Sandra 2009
3DS Max 9 SP2 Scenes
SPECapc for SolidWorks 2007™
SPECviewperf® 10.0 – ran at 1280 X 1024 Resolution. 

Results that have been shown within this review are from the application / benchmarks first run as we have found on many occasions that certain benchmarks conflict with their results after the first test.