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, I found the ASUS Maximus V Gene to be a bit underwhelming, with relatively poor SATA 3 Gb/s performance, although it did manage to beat out the ECS Z77-based board by a few Megabytes per second.

HDTune Pro (SATA 6Gb/s)

SATA 6 Gb/s showed nearly the same as SATA 3 Gb/s, with the ASUS Maximus V Gene in second to last place. 20 MB/s may not seem like that much, but it's still a hefty deficit.

HDTune Pro (USB3.0)

USB 3.0 drive performance with the ASUS Maximus V Gene was much better, right near the top, thanks to the design choice of the ASMedia USB 3.0 controller.

RightMark Audio Analyzer

It seems that the ASUS Maximus V Gene's audio design paid off in spade, with RMAA giving one of the best results to date with the ASUS Maximus V Gene. It performed so well, in fact, that I don't think RMAA did it any justice with these results, as the audio is one of the best I've seen ever, and very close to ASUS's own Xonar D2X that I use in my personal audio rig. That's saying a lot, considering this result didn't come from a seperate add-in card!