GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD7 Motherboard Review

GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7 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 the below.

• GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7 – 2 x Etron EJ168 chips
• 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 Etron EJ168 USB 3.0 controllers on the GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7 didn’t perform quite as well as the ASMedia chips did on the ASUS Crosshair. The Sequential Read on the 990FXA-UD7 was 172.5MB/s while the Crosshair V Formula was 204.2MB/s, thats a difference of 18.5%. The Sequential Writes speeds were much closer. Having a difference of only 6MB/s between the boards, though the GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7 still didn’t keep up.

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.

GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7 USB 3.0 HD Tune 4.61 Read Benchmark Results

GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7 USB 3.0 HD Tune 4.61 Write 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: Once again we see a rather substantial difference between our two boards. The Average Read of the GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7 was 45.5MB/s behind the ASUS Crosshair. The Average Write speeds were much further apart in HD Tune than they were in CrystalDiskMark. The GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7 pulled an average write speed of only 155.6MB/s while the ASUS Crosshair V Formula was able to hit 204.3MB/s.