Motherboard peripheral performance
Some of the biggest performance differences you'll find between motherboards come on the peripheral front, where it's easy to spot where mobo makers have skimped on auxiliary peripheral chips.

The days of cheap PCI-based Gigabit Ethernet controllers appear to be behind us, at least with high-end offerings like the ones we're looking at today. All three boards offer solid throughput with low CPU utilization, with the Gigabyte board's newer RTL8111D requiring fewer cycles than the revision-C chips used on the Asus and MSI boards.

Firewire performance looks good across the board. In fact, these cheaper boards actually offer better Firewire write speeds than their more expensive counterparts.

With all these boards sharing the same ICH10R USB controller, it's no surprise that they all offer equivalent performance here.

First, the obvious. If you're going to use the ICH10R's integrated Serial ATA controller, there's essentially no difference between the P6T, Platinum, and UD3R. The performance picture gets a little more muddled when we look at the secondary storage options on each board, all of which post slower transfer rates than the ICH10R. I'm not sure what's up with the incredibly slow write speed on the X58 Platinum's JMB322 controller, but it was consistently slow across multiple test runs. Given the overall performance of these secondary SATA controllers, you're better off sticking with the ICH10R, whose six Serial ATA ports should be more than enough for most folks.

I'm just about convinced that the P6T's ALC1200 codec chip is, apart from its label, identical to the ALC888 found on the Platinum and UD3R. RightMark Audio Analyzer doesn't detect much of a difference in signal quality between these boards when looping back 24-bit, 192kHz audio from their front analog outputs to their line inputs.