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 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 the Corsair ForceGT (60% full) to simulate performance in real-world situations, and I do use the same drive to test all interfaces too.

HDTune Pro (SATA2)

In HDTune Pro SATA 3 GB/s performance, we found the GigabyteX79S-UP5 WiFi to be underperforming. It placed last, but really, it's only about 1% slower than the other results, if that.

HDTune Pro (SATA 6Gb/s)

SATA 6 Gb/s showed much the same, with the GigabyteX79S-UP5 WiFi right in the middle.

HDTune Pro (USB3.0)

USB 3.0 drive performance tests are done using the same Corsair ForceGT drive used to test SATA 3 Gb/s and SATA 6 Gb/s performance, and here we got much better results, with the GIgabyte board taking the top spot.

RightMark Audio Analyzer

Audio testing using RightMark Audio Analyzer provided pretty good numbers for the Gigabyte X79S-UP5 WiFi, rating the audio given by the onboard Realtek CODEC as "Good". Only a single item here was listed as "poor".