USB 3.0 Performance

We got our hands on two Kingston HyperX MAX 3.0 64GB drives to test the USB 3.0 performance of the P67 motherboards. We populated a pair of ports at the same time and executed CrystalDiskMark 3.0 twice simultaneously, targeting each Kingston drive. We ran the test three times to get an average read and write performance for each drive and then averaged the results of both drives to get the figures below.

This method won't come close to testing the maximum performance of the USB 3.0 bus, but at this stage, it's the best we could devise. USB 3.0 devices that can fully utilize this new interface are virtually non-existent.

The MSI P67A-GD55 provided about average performance with solid reads but lackluster writes. Meanwhile, the Gigabyte P67A-UD7 had very strong read/write performance to all six rear USB 3.0 ports but whatever reason, the front ports were slightly weaker. Nonetheless, its write performance was still better than anything we saw from MSI.

The ECS P67H2-A2 provided strong performance at its front ports and rather weak performance at the rear ports. The Asus P8P67 Deluxe gave similar results to that of the MSI P67A-GD55 by showing strong reads coupled with very weak writes. Finally, the Asrock P67 Extreme6 gave us the highest reads on all ports while maintain great writes.