Serial ATA performance
Now begins our look at peripheral performance. Since the Asus and Gigabyte boards share the same SB710 south bridge component, there's no need to present results for both of them, especially since memory bandwidth tends not to play a role in targeted peripheral performance tests. The 785G results on the following pages were obtained with our DDR3 config.

The Serial ATA disk controller is one of the most important components of a modern core logic chipset, so we threw each platform a selection of I/O-intensive storage tests using a Western Digital VelociRaptor.

IOMeter
We'll begin our storage tests with IOMeter, which subjects our systems to increasing multi-user loads. We used IOMeter's workstation and database test patterns, since those are more appropriate for desktop systems than the file or web server test patterns. This particular test makes good use of the Native Command Queuing capability built into the AHCI specification. However, the G41 Express' ICH7 storage controller doesn't support AHCI, putting it at a bit of a disadvantage, at least in theory. AMD has a history of horrible AHCI drivers that, as recently as two months ago, were essentially broken in Windows Vista.

And they're apparently broken in Windows 7, too. After seeing the 785G barely outpace the NCQ-less G41 Express, we tested the AMD platform again using Windows 7's integrated AHCI drivers. As you can see, they deliver much higher transaction rates than AMD's own drivers.

The Windows 7 drivers do consume more CPU cycles, but that's to be expected under the circumstances. They're doing more work, after all.

HD Tach
We used HD Tach 3.01's 8MB zone test to measure basic SATA throughput and latency.

The G41 Express fares a little better than the 785G in HD Tach's burst speed test. There's no difference in sustained transfer rates between the two, though.

Given HD Tach's +/- 2% margin of error in the CPU utilization test, it looks like the 785G and G41 are on essentially equal footing here.