High-End Chipset Battle

USB 2.0 Benchmark Results

We compared USB 2.0 throughput using one and two fast USB 2.0 hard drives, to determine the maximum bandwidth of the chipset controllers. USB devices were hooked to the same USB root hub to see how performance varies once a controller has to deal with two bandwidth hungry devices.

Intel’s ICH8 and ICH9 southbridges still have the fastest USB 2.0 controllers available: ICH9R delivers more than 30 MB/s with a single drive and 20.4 MB/s with two drives. Although the nForce 790i SLI cannot beat the 30 MB/s maximum, it is head to head with the Intel chipsets with two drives hooked up.