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. For audio, we've changed how we report the numbers provided, using screenshots from the textual results that RMAA provides.

HDTune Pro (SATA2)

The Biostar TA75A+ gave fairly decent results on the SATA 2 front, within a couple of megabytes of all the other boards.

HDTune Pro (SATA 6 Gb/s)

SATA 6 Gb/s results were also pretty good, although a bit behind the other products we've tested.

HDTune Pro (USB3.0)

In USB 3.0 performance, the Biostar TA75A+ really shines, thanks to the AMD A75 chipset having a USB 3.0 controller built right inside.

RightMark Audio Analyzer

We ended up being surprised by the RightMark Audio results, considering the rest of the results weren't too spectacular. Here, once we had configured the driver properly, we got pretty good results, which we found reflected in what we heard while conducting our usage testing. Quite a few of the numbers are exactly where we expect them to be for a Realtek ALC899 chipset.