USB 3.0 and SATA 3

Over the last few generations Intel and AMD have been doing a great job adding more and more USB 2 and 3 ports on their chipsets. Before, nearly every motherboard needed to run a second controller to add additional ports. The same happened on the SATA side as well. Back then testing the USB and SATA interfaces was important because those controllers didn’t always perform up to our standards. With all four of these boards we have more than enough of ports running on the Intel chipset and as you can see below, because of that the performance numbers are about what you would expect. I would still love to see MSI include something similar to Asus’s USB 3 Boost, they were able to get huge improvements using the same SSD and USB 3.0 drive that I tested on all of 6 motherboards.