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 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 X79 Extreme11 to be underperforming, placing second to last.

HDTune Pro (SATA 6Gb/s)

SATA 6 Gb/s showed a slightly different picture, with the ASRock X79 Extreme11 beating out a few other results, with it still in the lower portion of the graph. Too bad, that.

HDTune Pro (USB3.0)

USB 3.0 drive performance tests are done using the same Corsair F60 drive used to test SATA 3 Gb/s performance, and here we got a very similar picture, with the ASRock X79 Extreme11 sitting right at the bottom of the graph, in last place.

RightMark Audio Analyzer

Audio testing using RightMark Audio Analyzer provided pretty good numbers for the ASRock X79 Extreme11, rating the audio given by the onboard Creative CODEC as "Good". Not a single item here was listed as "poor", with the lowest rating given as "Average". I've mentioned before that I really like this Creative Recon3Di CODEC, and this is another perfect example to show why. The ASRock X79 Extreme11 might be one of the most complex boards I've ever tested electrically, yet none of this seemed to impact audio performance one bit despite other OEMs having issues dealing with EMI. Nice job, ASRock, please give the engineers that worked on the audio a pat on the back, because they really did a good job here.