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 SATA performance was something that has us and MSI stumped for the longest time. Originally, we got the board and it was outright terrible - there was a clear bottleneck and we went back to MSI and told it to crack out the pipe cleaner. After a few weeks of sporadic testing in the bit-tech HQ proceeded to discover the depth of the problem with our own variety of hardware (it was a universal issue), while MSI's own engineers at its Taiwan HQ worked on a solution.

A dozen emails and plenty of MSN conversations back and forth and finally MSI cracked the code updating us with BIOS .131 beta (.137 beta is out now and 1.3 retail is out May 5th 2009), the latest SB7xx RAIDSTOR Vista driver 3.1.1540.86, and we were also told to disable the Cool'n'Quiet function in the BIOS - despite setting Vista to "High Performance" mode. It seems a conflict in the Cool'n'Quiet function and the BIOS can lop off about 50 percent SATA read performance.

All this together affords the performance in the first graph above: after all the tweaking the MSI is out ahead of the Asus by a couple of MB/s (so long as you have a fast SSD), however nothing can help the rubbish JMicron chipset that MSI acknowledges is inherently limited. In contrast, Asus did permanently sacrifice a native SB750 SATA port for eSATA duty. Not only we think internal ports should take priority over external, our readers tell us that six SATA is often not enough so losing one to eSATA limits a build. eSATA should be a standard feature, but considering it's often only used for mass storage, performance is somewhat less of an issue. The other two ports on the MSI are also JMicron, so we'd recommend assigning them to SATA optical drives rather than hard drives.

Another quick note is that OCZ has also kindly informed us that those of you using SSDs will benefit from an additional bit of southbridge voltage too.

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 was great from the get-go though - exceeding the Asus by a couple of MB/s, and although it's still slower than the ~35MB/s Nvidia and Intel boards regularly hit, it's very good for an AMD board where we regularly see anything between 25-30MB/s.