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 MSI Z68A-GD65 (G3) right in second place, along with a lot of other products.

HDTune Pro (SATA 6 Gb/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.

HDTune Pro (USB3.0)

USB 3.0 drive performance proved to put the Z68A-GD65 (G3) on top of the pile, much different from the NEC/Renesas products on the other boards. Again, because the controller is on the PCIe bus, we suspect the "G3" moniker is paying off yet again.

RightMark Audio Analyzer

MSI uses the same ALC892 CODEC as many other products we have seen in our reviews. These results are very good, and we didn't notice any obvious problems during our usage testing.