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 ASUS P9X79 Deluxe to return results exactly as expected, right near the top, and exactly matched with the ECS X79R-AX.

HDTune Pro (SATA 6Gb/s)

SATA 6 Gb/s showed nearly the same as SATA 3Gb/s, with the P9X79 Deluxe just one tenth of a megabyte behind our top result.

HDTune Pro (USB3.0)

USB 3.0 drive performance failed to put the P9X79 Deluxe 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. We are not too sure why the ASUS P9X79 Deluxe seems to come up short here, but we did also notice that our USB 3.0 device was incompatible with the USB 3.0 SuperSpeed technology either, so that may have had some impact on the result. Of course, the ECS X79R-Ax had no such issues and took the top spot, but it did employ a different controller, so the results are not directly comparable, but still stand for what users can expect during normal usage.

RightMark Audio Analyzer

The RMAA results given by the ASUS P9X79 Deluxe are rated by RMAA as good, however, we did notice that the volume given by the ASUS P9X79 Deluxe was a bit lower than what other products we have tested offer. Quite a few of the results are listed as "average", so there could be some improvement here, for sure.