ATA performance
ATA performance was tested with a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ATA/133 hard drive using HD Tach 3.01's 8MB zone setting.

Only the burst speed test shows much of a performance gap between the boards, and there the MSI P35 Platinum and Gigabyte GA-P35-DQ6 trail the leaders a little.

Serial ATA performance
Moving to Serial ATA, we tested performance with a Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD SATA hard drive. Again, we used HD Tach 3.01's 8MB zone test.

Don't, er, read too much into these HD Tach write speeds. Intel has confirmed that a bug with Western Digital's Caviar RE2 hard drives can affect performance in this test when combined with ICHxR south bridge chips. We're using Western Digital Raptor drives here, but this is the same behavior we observed with the Caviar RE2, so it's likely the same problem. You can read more about the issue here.

Apart from not-so-blistering write speeds, the main storyline here is the performance of auxiliary storage controllers on the Gigabyte and MSI boards. The DQ6 looks to have the edge with faster burst and write speeds, but its CPU utilization is a little higher. Of course, HD Tach's margin of error in the CPU utilization test is +/- 2%, making those results a bit of a wash.