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)

We noticed a divergence from the rest of the numbers when testing drive performance, with our Gigabyte G1.Sniper2 right in second place, along with a lot of other products as expected.

HDTune Pro (SATA 6Gb/s)

SATA 6 Gb/s again showed quite decent performance, although not high in the chart, but with less than 1% of difference from the best result, and perfectly matched with the MSI PCIe 3.0 board.

HDTune Pro (USB3.0)

USB 3.0 drive performance proved to put the Gigabyte G1.Sniper2 in the middle of the pile, much different from the EtronTech products on the other boards. It's just 0.4 MB behind the top result though, so while not the very best result, it's not anything that will really be noticed during daily usage.

RightMark Audio Analyzer

We were quite surprised by the Gigabyte G1.Sniper2's audio results, with several results posting "very poor" results. We did find the Creative X-Fi CODEC a bit heavy on the bass side of things, and the high end of the frequency range seemed to almost be missing. However, one of the great things about having a dedicated CODEC such as the Creative CA20K2 is that most such solutions carry extensive software options that will allow users to customize tonal qualities to suit their own personal tastes. Once we had done so, we found the audio far better than the numbers provided by RightMark Audio Analyzer, and once we fired up some games, we immediately noticed the excellent 3-D positional sound offered by the CA20K2's processing, noticibly better than some of the other onboard solutions we've experienced lately. RightMark very accurately scores the Gigabyte G1.Sniper2 as average with default settings, but there's a siren waiting to lure you over to the rocks, hidden in the settings, if you take the time to set things up right.