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 that 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 no board employs 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 Gigabyte B75M-D3H to return results not quite exactly as expected, right near the bottom.

HDTune Pro (SATA 6Gb/s)

SATA 6 Gb/s showed nearly the same as SATA 3 Gb/s, with the B75M-D3H just two places above our worst result.

HDTune Pro (USB3.0)

USB 3.0 drive performance failed to put the B75M-D3H on top, and it's quite close to the bottom, but it didn't place last, as you'd expect from such an affordable product.

RightMark Audio Analyzer

Considering that this is an entry-level product, I was quite impressed to see the Gigabyte B75M-D3H score so well in RightMark Audio Analyzer. This is better than some of the results that use much better audio CODECs, so again Gigabyte has provided more than I could have ever expected.