A very important part of overall system responsiveness is down to hard drive performance. We use one of our favourite benchmark utilities – CrystalDiskMark X64 Edition – to rate performance from the on-board SATA controller.
This test shows how important it is to connect SSDs to the SATA-600 ports on the motherboard as a SATA-300 port would restrict performance considerably.
Awesome, great photos too Henry, really enjoyed that read. ordering one today as I am not moving to haswell this generation.
Well that is a beautiful design, I love the dragon engraved into the heatsink. excellent power delivery potential. Price point is quite competitive, considering the big foot networking adds a lot of the cost.
MSI bioses are solid, I always buy them. I am waiting on haswell and their high end board for the 4770k.
Good product though, just at the end of a life cycle which might stop sales a little. Haswell is due in a few months.