KribiBench, Realstorm, XviD, HDTach
The 8KDA3+ continues to edge out its stablemate in performance terms. It's a touch faster in Realstorm's Raytracing benchmark. Again, we must stress that the difference is only noticeable when quantified and expressed in graphs like these. You can't tell the difference between 59.8 and 60.2FPS on a purely visual basis. It would be foolhardy to contemplate a change in S754 chipset if you run at stock speeds.
Consistenly 5 seconds faster in encoding the first VOB of Sleepy Hollow. A touch more bandwidth and a smidge less latency can explain the difference away.
Here's a strange one. KribiBench always returns a higher result for NVIDIA-based S754 motherboards. From what's gone before, i.e extremely close benchmarks, it's hard to explain how and why the performance delta increases so greatly.
I ran HDTach v2.60 to ascertain very rudimentary SATA performance from both on-chip and discrete SATA. On-chip SATA, which runs off the two ports just above the AGP slot, is shown above. Decent access time and STR from a WD 36GB Raptor drive. Burst speed was calculated to be 90,682kps. We're concerned with the reported CPU utilisation, however.
The same drive on Silicon Image's 4-port PCI controller. Very, very similar in most respects. Burst speed was just a little higher at 93,414kps. Storage is really one of the nForce3 250Gb's main advantages of its predecessor. On-chip IDE and SATA can be RAIDed and combined for all manner of esoteric setups. Additional controllers, such as S.I's, give even more flexibility.