USB and SATA
For the next batch of testing I busted out CrystalDiskMark and our trusty old 60GB Corsair Force GT drive. I started by testing the SATA 3 performance. The ITX board outperformed the original MSI board by a decent margin as well as the Gigabyte board by two MB/s. For USB testing I did the same test using the same drive only this time I used a Thermaltake BlackX USB 3.0 dock. This is where the MSI Z170A Gaming M5 fell behind but its smaller ITX brother kicked butt and matched the performance of the Gigabyte board. I also took the chance to test out the performance improvement when using MSIs USB 3.1 Boost option in their Command Center software. This gave us a 30MB/s improvement. Individually this looks great but honestly I had higher hopes as previous experiences with Asus’s USB Turbo Boost option has netted improvements of closer to 200MB/s in our past tests. I’m glad that MSI has included it but I do hope they work on it more in the future to see even bigger performance improvements.
SATA3 | Read Speed |
MSI Z170A Gaming M5 | 435.6 |
Gigabyte Z170X Gaming 7 | 442.8 |
MSI Z170I Gaming Pro AC | 444.4 |
USB 3.1 | Read Speed |
MSI Z170A Gaming M5 | 220.3 |
Gigabyte Z170X Gaming 7 | 251.5 |
MSI Z170I Gaming Pro AC |
251.3 280.9 w/USB 3.1 Boost |