Sustained And Repetitive Transfer Performance
Once our drive was completely “broken in,” the only real quirk we saw was in the 890FX Deluxe4’s front-panel win over its rear panel ports, in only one benchmark and only in average performance. So far, so good for ASRock’s front-panel connector.
Sustained writes weren’t so impressive, as the reference system’s average performance hammered every solution from ASRock. We retested to confirm this finding. Meanwhile, each motherboards front-panel ports give about the same performance as its rear-panel ports.
Repetitive transfers are where the P55’s slower PCIe 1.1 connection becomes an obvious hindrance. The other solutions are on par with each other, with the X58 Extreme6’s PCIe bridge causing only mild reductions in write performance. ASRock’s front-panel connectors still look like a perfect match for its rear-panel performance.