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ABIT Hot Rod 66 ATA-66 Controller
ABIT Hot Rod 66 ATA-66 Controller - PCSTATS
A couple of years ago the newest greatest IDE standard was first introduced. The ATA-33. Although we were promised great gains in performance preliminary performance...
 82% Rating:   
Filed under: Hard Drives/SSD Published:  Author: 
External Mfg. Website: ABIT Mar 02 2000   D. Dee  
Home > Reviews > Hard Drives/SSD > ABIT Hot Rod 66

Features And Specs

Chipset: HPT366 Ultra DMA66 IDE Controller
Bus: PCI
Drive Mode Support: Ultra ATA 4/3/2/1/0, PIO 4/3/2/1/0, DMA 2/1/0
Specifications: Ultra DMA 66MB/sec data transfer rates, Two independent ATA channels, 256 byte FIFO per ATA channel, Concurrent PIO and bus master access, Compliant with Plug & Play, Up to 4 IDE devices supported
BIOS Support: Auto identifies and configures drive type, Auto detects and supports Ultra Mode, Recognizes drives up to 128GB
Advanced Features: Supports new CRC enhanced data protection for Ultra ATA drives, Supports dual data channels to allow separate device timings for Ultra ATA and EIDE devices, Supports ACPI functions
Operating Systems Supported: MS DOS 5.x and higher, MS Windows 95/98, MS Windows NT 4

Performance

The benchmarks below were run a minimum of five times, and the best 3 scores were averaged. I used SiSoft Sandra 99 Professional and Winbench 99 to measure subsystem performance..

Test System Configuration

Processor(s) Intel Celeron 300A @ 504Mhz
Memory 64 Megs PC-100 SDRAM
Hard Disk Drive WD Caviar 13.1 Gig ATA-66 5400 rpm
Video Card 3dfx Voodoo 3 2000 AGP
Operating System Windows 98

Sandra 99 Pro Performance



The way the above chart is presented you would think that there is a huge difference between the two results. But looking at the numbers you can see from the performance differences between ATA-33 and ATA-66 modes are very minimal. Clearly in ATA-66 mode the performance is slightly higher, but it's so minimal that real world performance would not be affected. In case you are wondering how I managed to run the hard drive in ATA-33 mode using the Hot Rod controller, I simply used a normal 40 conductor cable instead of the 80 conductor ATA-66 cable. You must remember that ALL requirements must be met in order for ATA-66 mode to work.

Let's compare to the ABIT BE6 mainboard



Same story here. Not much difference between the ABIT BE6 ATA-66 controller and the Hot Rod 66. And there shouldn't be. They utilize the same chip. Furthermore, comparing ATA-33 to ATA-66 yields the same comparable results. So far we haven't seen a particular advantage in using an ATA-66 controller as far as real world perfomance is concerned. Synthetic benchmarks such as Sandra 99 Pro are good for concentrating testing in very specific areas, but we must not forget real world performance especially when results are so close to each other. Let's continue.

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Contents of Article: ABIT Hot Rod 66
 Pg 1.  ABIT Hot Rod 66 ATA-66 Controller
 Pg 2.  — Features And Specs
 Pg 3.  High-End Disk Winmark
 Pg 4.  Conclusion

 
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