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)

We noticed no divergence from the rest of the numbers when testing drive performance, with our ECS X79R-AX board coming out near the top here using our SATA2 test drive. A very good result, which quite obviously shows the strength of the Intel X79 Express southbridge chipset on the ECS X79R-AX, even with some added abilities not seen on other OEM products.

HDTune Pro (SATA 6Gb/s)

SATA 6 Gb/s showed nearly the same as SATA 3Gb/s, with the X79R-AX just two tenths of a megabyte behind our top result.

HDTune Pro (USB3.0)

USB 3.0 drive performance is a different story, with the Texas Instrument USB 3.0 controllers helping the ECS X79R-AX take the top spot.

RightMark Audio Analyzer

ECS uses the same ALC892 CODEC as we saw in our last few reviews, employed by ASUS on the P8P67 PRO, the ASUS M5A97 EVO, and by ECS on the P67H2-A2 that we looked at nearly a year ago. With audio performance that was fairly decent to our ears, Rightmark Audio Analyzer did show audio quality similar to the other ECS 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 ECS given the time they've been working with this CODEC.