ASUS P9X79 Pro Intel X79 Motherboard Review

ASUS P9X79 Pro Intel X79 Motherboard SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Performance

There are a number of different Super Speed USB 3.0 host controllers out there. In order to know which ones perform the best we run a series of tests that will put the controller through the ringer and see how it comes out on the other side. Each of our motherboards uses a different Super Speed USB 3.0 controller and you can find them below.

• ASUS P9X79 Pro – ASMedia USB 3.0 controller
• ASUS Sabertooth X58 – NEC USB 3.0 controller
• ASUS Crosshair V Formula – ASMedia USB 3.0 controller

CrystalDiskMark is a small benchmark utility for drives and enables rapid measurement of sequential and random read/write speeds. Note that CDM only supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32 (as noted) for the last listed benchmark score. This can skew some results in favor of controllers that also do not support NCQ.

Testing of the USB3 was done using the Thermaltake BlacX 5G Hard Drive Docking Station. The drive used was an OCZ Vertex 3 120GB SSD.

Benchmark Results: The ASUS P9X79 Pro was right on track with our other motherboards that we have in the lineup. Our sequential read was 212.2MB/s which fell right between the Crosshair V Formula’s 204.2MB/s and the Sabertooth X58’s 218.3MB/s. The sequential write of the ASUS P9X79 Pro was slightly ahead of the pack with 178.2MB/s.

HD Tune Pro 4.01 is an extended version of HD Tune which includes
many new features such as write benchmark, secure erasing, AAM setting,
folder usage view, disk monitor, command line parameters and file
benchmark.

ASUS P9X79 Pro Intel X79 Motherboard USB 3.0 HD Tune 4.61 Write Benchmark Results

ASUS P9X79 Pro Intel X79 Motherboard USB 3.0 HD Tune 4.61 Read Benchmark Results

Testing of the USB3 was done using the Thermaltake BlacX 5G Hard Drive Docking Station. The drive used was an OCZ Vertex 3 120GB SSD.

Benchmark Results: The ASUS P9X79 Pro was able to take the top spot in both the read and write tests in HD Tune 4.61. The ASUS P9X79 Pro was able to hit 228.0MB/s which was enough to edge out the ASUS Sabertooth X58’s read rate of 225.7MB/s. The Average write of the P9X79 Pro was 236.5MB/s which is 32.2MB/s faster than the Crosshair V Formula and 77.2MB/s faster than the ASUS Sabertooth X58!