Motherboard peripheral performance
Core logic chipsets integrate a wealth of peripherals, but they don't handle everything. Firewire and audio are farmed out to auxiliary chips, for example. AMD chipsets also rely on third party silicon for networking, and many motherboards feature additional SATA controllers to complement south bridge Serial ATA offerings.

To provide a closer look at the peripheral performance you can expect from the motherboards we've tested today, we've compiled Ethernet, USB, Firewire, Serial ATA, and Audio performance results below. You'll notice that there isn't much variance from one board to another, but there are a few things worth pointing out.

On the Ethernet front, the GA-MA790FX-DQ6's Realtek networking chips do a good job of keeping up with the nForce 590 SLI's integrated GigE controllers.

The Gigabyte board also has a clear advantage in Firewire performance, offering faster burst speeds in addition to higher sustained throughput. Were Firewire more popular, that would almost make up for the SB600's pokey USB performance.

There's little difference in Serial ATA performance between the Gigabyte board's SB600 and GSATA Serial ATA controllers.

RightMark Audio Analyzer yields identical analog output quality scores for both boards. Of course, if you're really concerned with fidelity, you'll want to take advantage of these boards' digital audio outputs.