Drive and Audio Performance Results

Our drive and audio testing differs a bit from the rest of our testing for several reasons. First of all, when it comes to drive performance comparison, nearly every platform on the market is very close to one another, as most do provide external drive controllers which means the numbers offered are very much platform agnostic. And finally, with audio, we do not list any numbers except for those reported by the product we are testing in order to provide the most information possible, as each audio CODEC will behave quite differently, and each board does not employ the same CODEC. As such, there is no standard we can use other than the numbers themselves. You can always check our other motherboard reviews in order to make direct comparisons to audio performance.

We've tested each drive interface separately in order to provide the most complete numbers possible. Employing HDTune Pro for all of the testing, we tested each drive outside of the OS environment, using a separate OS on a separate drive. However, we do use drives with a fair amount of data on them (60% full) to simulate performance in real-world situations.

HDTune Pro (SATA2)

In HDTune Pro SATA 3 GB/s performance, we found the ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion to be a bit underperforming, but perhaps our Corsair F60 drive is noticing some degradation. At the same time, it is faster than the ASRock Z77 Extreme9, which I completed testing on just a couple of weeks ago.

HDTune Pro (SATA 6Gb/s)

SATA 6 Gb/s showed a slightly different picture, with the ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion beating the majority of all other products.

HDTune Pro (USB3.0)

You don't see any results here for the ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion, as it proved incompatible with the external enclosure I use for testing. I have notified ASRock of the issue and am expecting an updated BIOS to fix the problem.

RightMark Audio Analyzer

Audio testing using RightMark Audio Analyzer provided pretty good numbers for the ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion, rating the audio given by the onboard Creative CODEC as "Good". I had many comments about the audio given on the recording side of this CODEC on the ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion, with many saying it gave pretty decent sound all things considered. Many thanks go out to a few select gamers that provided me with feedback. You know who you are. ;)