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.


The Gigabyte SATA performance is good, but marginally behind both the Asus and MSI boards here by a few MB/s. Only the highest performing SSDs capable of over 200MB/s will be affected though.


Despite the fact that 136.3MB/s from the MSI board is quite lacking compared to the native SATA performance, because of the extra chipset and constriction in bandwidth, the Gigabyte barely makes it over ATA100 speeds at 111MB/s, severely limiting the performance. It's good enough for optical drives, and at least Gigabyte provides extra SATA, unlike the Asus board that is vacant from our list above.


Both the Asus and Gigabyte boards use native SB750 SATA to achieve a very high performance, although the Gigabyte cheats a little by only including the PCI bracket option rather than a dedicated port. The MSI uses a separate JMicron chipset, so also suffers in comparison, but since eSATA is mostly mass storage it's not a huge issue.

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.


USB 2.0 performance on AMD southbridges has never really been as good as Intel or Nvidia, although the Gigabyte board matches the Asus here, both can't seem to keep up with the 3MB/s faster MSI.