Subsystem: USB and Ethernet Performance
Many thanks goes out ot Western Digital for supplying the external USB2.0 hard drives used for testing these features!
Using 7200 RPM HDDs from Western Digital we use HD Tach to test the read and write speeds of the USB connection. Here you can see the two Asus boards are nearly identical in performance and have similar CPU utilization scores (HD Tach says +/- 3% is normal).
NTttcp Benchmark (from Microsoft)
Here we are testing the on-board networking ports on the A8N32-SLI motherboard by running the NTTTCP benchmarking scripts from the Microsoft developer suite. I set up a “server” machine to use in the test that consisted of another NF4 SLI motherboard and an add-on PCI Express Gigabit networking card.
You can see that thanks to the PCIe bus, the Marvell chip running on it can nearly keep up with the NV integrated Gigabit networking as well, but with a slightly higher CPU utilization.
