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Don't assume that you should always install all
motherboard utilities and drivers supplied by the manufacturer. After
we finished building this system, we installed patches and drivers in
the order recommended by Intel, which was to install Windows 2000,
followed by SP1 (we actually used SP2), followed by the INF update,
followed by DirectX 8, followed by the Intel Ultra ATA Storage Driver
(which was subsequently incorporated into the Intel Application
Accelerator utility).
After we installed the operating system and
service pack, we benchmarked the system. SiSoft Sandra reported hard
drive performance of 25,374. We then installed the INF update,
DirectX 8, and the Intel Application Accelerator. When we benchmarked
the system again, we found that hard drive performance had dropped to
below 10,000. Thinking that perhaps there was a conflict of some sort
with Sandra, we then tested the system using several other
benchmarks, including PC Magazine's WinBench 99 2.0.
All reported much lower hard drive performance than expected.
We stripped the system down to bare metal, reinstalled Windows 2000 and
SP2, tested again using all the benchmarks, and found that all
reported very high performance. We then installed the INF update,
DirectX 8, and the Intel Application accelerator again, and found
that the hard driver performance benchmarks plummeted dramatically.
Thinking that perhaps DirectX 8 was causing the problem, we stripped
the system to bare metal again and installed Windows 2000, SP2, and
DirectX 8. Running the benchmarks showed the same high performance as
before we installed DirectX 8, so clearly the problem was somehow
related to the Intel Ultra ATA Storage Driver.
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