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

 

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #37566 16 Jan 2016 02:20
Today I check out the Z170I Gaming Pro AC from MSI, their gaming focused Mini-ITX board
VaporX's Avatar
VaporX replied the topic: #37567 16 Jan 2016 02:38
I have reached the point I do not like the "gaming" motherboards. You can often get the same performance, minus a little overclocking potential for as much as 30% less, especially in ITX format.

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