A very important part of overall system responsiveness is down to hard drive performance. We use two of our favourite benchmark utilities Crystalmark X64 Edition and HD Tach to rate the SSD and HDD.
The OCZ Vertex 3 SSD is a fantastic performance drive and it highlights the benefits of moving to one of the new Sandforce powered units.
I have been using HDTach for many years now and always find it is an invaluable benchmark to ascertain potential levels of performance. HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get close to the physical performance of the device.
An average measured speed of around 375 MB/s is a good score for HDTach, even though it falls far short of the actual drive's real world performance levels.
Funky colour scheme…. looks very similar to the ‘army’ MSI boards ive noticed in the last few months.
I really like the new bios systems. my bud bought a sandybridge board and they are leaps ahead of the older bios systems. This is a nice option for AMD lovers, but I wonder what percentage of sales these boards really get on the market against Sandybridge
Good boards, but the new cpus are the main thing im waiting on. id say SLI and CFx are small markets. a new range of CPUs might make AMD competitive again. If they can match the 2600k they are onto a winner, but its a tall order.
A lot of detail in this. I really do rate the X6 processors. I thought they would be pretty poor and my friend bought the 1090T and I wouldnt even know it wasn’t an intel chip. I suppose benchmarks highlight it more, but for gaming? I doubt anyone would know if someone changed their system without them looking.
Im excited to see the new CPU’s. Its a nice start, but its pretty uninspiring, apart from SLI support. and most people who want SLI will already have intel chipsets.
I bet this took some behind the scenes negotiations. Nvidia allowing AMD to use SLI.
Good move however and nice new range of boards. Will be looking forward to the new range of processors.
AMD have such a tough job really. Intel are dominating the CPU market. I do agree, the 1100T and 1090T are great products. for gaming they are perfect.
Asus make great boards, this is one of them. Sorry but im waiting for the new cpus before I even contemplate a new board. The current phenom X4 and X6 range doesnt appeal to me. im not a power user, but I dont see any reason yet to move to intel.
Finally a modern board that can do X16 sli, Intel can stick their thousand different socket types where they belong