PCI bus benchmark?

[funky-d-munky]

I have done a decent search but can not find such a tool. I think it would be great and SHOULD be part of every MB review.
Does anyone know of one?
funky

[Dr Mordrid]

PCI bus performance is tricky to measure and is most accurately done using bus analyzer hardware. This can not only show you the throughput but also see how many bytes go through the bus in each burst packet.

One software method is to set up a RAID using 3-4 drives that is fast enough to saturate the PCI bus during benchmarks and see how fast it can do sequential read/writes. This is best done using a RAID0 array, a card that has all IDE master connects and a relatively low CPU hit.

The Promise TX4, SX4000 and many of 3Wares cards are good for this as they have a low CPU hit and all IDE master conects. Most other Promise cards, the Adaptec 1200, Highpoints and many others use IDE master/slave connects and so would have a hard time saturating the bus on Intel and SiS systems in particular.

With such a RAID setup VIA chipsets will usually bench at about 70-80 MB/s while nForce, 100% AMD, SiS and Intel chipsets range from 95-115 MB/s.