SATA, USB and FireWire Speeds
Using HDTach 3.0.1.0 and a few handy peripherals, we were able to get some benchmark numbers off of both the SATA controllers on the boards as well as the USB and FireWire connections.
SATA Performance — South Bridge
Here we tested the two south bridge based SATA controllers. On the A8R32 that means the ULi M1575 chipset and on the A8N32 that is the NVIDIA MCP. We used a new Raptor 150 GB 10k RPM hard drive for the test drive.
USB Performance
Taking a 7200 RPM IDE external hard drive from Western Digital we use HDTach to find the top transfer speeds on both motherboards.
FireWire Performance
This external drive has both USB 2.0 and FireWire support so these results are from the same drive with the FireWire connection.
ATI’s SB600 south bridge brings its SATA performance on par with NVIDIA; a first for their chipset. Though NVIDIA’s USB performance is still faster than ATI’s the performance gap has shrunk considerably since the SB450 was released last year.