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, differences between the P55 and P67 chipsets do leave the P55 platform with a distinct disadvantage, such that we have excluded those results from our reporting. 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, although we do use drives with a fair amount of data on them to simulate performance in real-world situations.

HDTune Pro (SATA2)

We noticed a divergence from the rest of the numbers when testing drive performance, with our ASUS M5A97 EVO "B2" board coming out near the top here using our SATA2 test drive. A very good result, quite obviously showing the strength of the AMD950 Southbridge chipset.

HDTune Pro (SATA 6Gb/s)

SATA 6 Gb/s showed the same as SATA 3Gb/s, with the second highest spot again claimed by the M5A97 EVO.

HDTune Pro (USB3.0)

USB 3.0 drive performance failed to put the M5A97 EVO on top, most likely due to it employing the Asmedia USB 3.0 controllers, much different from the NEC/Renesas and Etron products on the other boards. The complete result almost seems to show a bandwidth limitation when we tested using the ports on the rear I/O, so we repeated our tests using the front panel header, and we received the exact same numbers. We are not too sure why the ASUS M5A97 PRO seems to come up short here, but given the pricing and intended market for the ASUS M5A97 EVO, we were confused, but not concerned.

RightMark Audio Analyzer

ASUS uses the same ALC892 CODEC as we saw in our last few reviews, employed by ASUS on the P8P67 PRO, and ECS on the P67H2-A2. While the audio performance was fairly decent to our ears, Rightmark Audio Analyzer did audio quality similar to the other ASUS ALC892 result, a product of the circuit design and other components used in the board's audio loop. These results are very good, and we expect no less from ASUS.