USB 3.0, SATA 6Gb/s, Motherboards, And Overcoming Bottlenecks
Features
published
Soon, 4.8 Gb/s USB 3.0 and 6 Gb/s SATA will be hitting the mainstream. But be careful when you buy your next mainstream motherboard; some don't handle these technologies very well. We compare three implementations and recommend best practice solutions.
Test Devices And Test Setup
We're using Crucial’s RealSSD-C300 as a high-bandwidth device and a Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB drive, both of which are equipped with a SATA 6Gb/s interface.
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System Hardware | |
---|---|
Hardware | Details |
Motherboard (Socket LGA 1156) | Gigabyte P55A-UD6 (Rev. 1.0) Chipset: P55 Express; BIOS: 7d |
Motherboard (Socket LGA 1156) | Gigabyte P55A-UD7 (Rev. 1.0) Chipset: P55 Express; BIOS: F3 |
Motherboard (Socket LGA 1156) | MSI P55-GD85 (Rev. 1.0) Chipset: P55 Express; BIOS: 1.1 |
CPU Intel | Intel Core i5-661 (32nm, 3.33 GHz, 2 x 256KB L2 and 4MB L3 Cache, TDP 87W, Rev. B1) |
RAM DDR3 (dual) | 2 x 2GB DDR3-1600 (OCZ OCZ3G2000LV4GK) DDR3-1333 8-8-8-24 1T |
Hard Drive | Seagate Barracuda 7200.11, 500GB (ST3500320AS) 7,200 RPM, SATA/300, 32MB Cache |
Graphics (2x) | Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 GPU: Cypress (725 MHz); Graphics RAM: 1GB GDDR5 (2,000 MT/s); Stream Processors: 1,440 |
Power Supply | PC Power & Cooling, Silencer 750EPS12V 750W |
System Software & Drivers | |
Operating System | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Updated 2010-02-23 |
Drivers and Settings | |
Intel Chipset Drivers | Chipset Installation Utility Ver. 9.1.1.1025 |
Intel Matrix Storage Manager | Version 8.9.0.1023 |
ATI Graphics Drivers | Radeon Version 10.1 |
Benchmarks | |
Performance Measurements | h2benchw 3.13 |
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