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. To provide a closer look at the peripheral performance you can expect from the motherboards we've tested today, we've complied Firewire and audio performance results below.
| HD Tach Firewire performance | ||||
|
Read burst speed (MB/s) |
Average read speed (MB/s) |
Average write speed (MB/s) |
CPU utilization (%) |
|
| Asus M3N-HT Deluxe | 42.3 | 37.6 | 28.6 | 1.0 |
| MSI K9A2 Platinum | 41.2 | 37.2 | 25.5 | 0.7 |
The Asus board's Firewire chip has faster write speeds than the one used on MSI's K9A2 Platinum.
| RightMark Audio Analyzer audio quality | |||||||||
| Overall score | Frequency response | Noise level | Dynamic range | THD | THD + Noise | IMD + Noise | Stereo Crosstalk | IMD at 10kHz | |
| Asus M3N-HT Deluxe | 4 | 5 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 3 | 5 | 3 |
| MSI K9A2 Platinum | 4 | 5 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 3 |
There's very little difference between these boards on the audio front.
