USB 3.0, SATA 6Gb/s, Motherboards, And Overcoming Bottlenecks

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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