MSI Big Bang XPower II Motherboard Review

Intel X79 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Performance

Intel X79 Motherboard SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Controller Chips:

• MSI Big Bang XPower II – NEC D720200 USB 3.0 controller
• BIOSTAR TPower X79 – ASMedia ASM1042 USB 3.0 controller
• ASRock X79 Extreme9 – Texas Instruments TUSB7340 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Controller
• ECS X79R-AX Black Extreme – Texas Instruments TUSB7340 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Controller
• ASUS Rampage IV Extreme – ASMedia ASM1042 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Controller
• GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD7 – Fresco FL1009 SuperSpeed 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.

The SuperSpeed USB 3.0 performance testing was done using a Corsair Force GT 240GB SSD.

Benchmark Results: The MSI Big Bang XPower II SuperSpeed USB 3.0 performance wasn’t quite as high as we had hoped for or seen on other motherboards we have tested recently. The Big Bang XPower II uses a NEC D720200 USB 3.0 controller, this is the first board in our charts that uses the NEC Controller. The Sequential Write of the Big Bang XPower II was solid at 206.4MB/s. It was behind the ASUS and BIOSTAR boards that use the ASMedia ASM1042 SS USB 3.0 controller by ~15MB/s. The GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD7 uses a Fresco FL1009 USB 3.0 controller and was 3MB/s faster than the MSI board. What really took a dive in performance was the Sequential Write speed. The MSI Big Bang XPower II saw a sequential write speed of only 165.7MB/s, the previously mentioned boards all had write speeds over 200MB/s. The ASUS and BIOSTAR boards which use the ASMedia ASM 1042 controller were both more that 70MB/s faster than the NEC controller.

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.

MSI Big Bang XPower II HD Tune Pro 4.61 Write Benchmark Results

MSI Big Bang XPower II HD Tune Pro 4.61 Read Benchmark Results

Benchmark Results: The results in HD Tune 4.61 mimic what we saw above in CDM. The average write performance was solid with 213.8MB/s. Behind the ASUS and BIOSTAR boards that use the ASMedia ASM1042 controller. Though this time around it was able to out perform the GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD7 Fresco FL1009 controller by 11.5MB/s. Looking at the average write speeds though, the Big Bang XPower II fell short again. With an average write of 152.4MB/s it was more than 90MB/s slower than the ASUS and BIOSTAR boards that use the ASMedia ASM1042 controllers and ~48MB/s behind the GIGABYTE X79-UD7 which uses the Fresco FL1009 controller.