SATA and eSATA Performance

Website: HD Tach 3.0

We tested the SATA and eSATA performance with an Intel X25-M SSD to maximise the use of the SATA connections to show up any core differences in raw performance.


We know why the P55 SATA performance is slow for the Asus board, and it's the same for Gigabyte's P55s too. When we test raw performance usually the system is generally in an idle state so the CPU clocks down a degree. It seems CPU performance is directly linked to SATA throughput to some degree, so the bandwidth appears lower when the system is idle.

We test the boards with the most recent, retail BIOS, but "out the box" with the manufacturers' choice of settings. The MSI is not compromised in the same way at all, and we would say is likely engineered to be at a higher clock for longer, but we didn't notice this specifically and as we've seen on the previous page, this clearly does not affect the power consumption either.

Asus seems to be having abysmal times with the JMicron chipset - something MSI seems to have solved (finally), and despite testing three BIOS from Asus (0209, 0405 and 0504), it did not change the JMicron SATA performance: they were consistently extremely poor. Even if you were to embrace Asus' "DriveXpert" feature in the BIOS, it wouldn't speed up your drives since the native throughput it obviously very limited.

USB 2.0 Performance

Website: HD Tach 3.0
We tested the USB performance with an Intel X25-M SSD and a SATA to USB adapter to saturate the USB bus in order to look for any performance drops.


Asus USB performance is surprisingly fast. Normally we see the USB 2.0 speed top out at 34.9MB/s, just like with the MSI board, but we found Asus' engineers have done something to its advantage because it kept coming out even faster!