Disk controller performance
ATA performance was tested with a Maxtor 740X-6L ATA/133 hard drive using HD Tach 3.01's 8MB zone setting.

The A8V Deluxe's ATA performance is comparable to the AV8, even a little better when it comes to CPU utilization and disk access times on the Promise PDC20378 RAID controller. I'm a little alarmed by the seemingly low read burst speed of both boards, though. We're used to seeing much higher read burst speeds with older versions of HD Tach, but I suspect the new release's 8MB zone setting exposes the limitations of our ATA hard drive's 2MB cache.

Moving to Serial ATA, we tested performance with a Western Digital Raptor WD360GD SATA hard drive. Again, we used HD Tach 3.01's 8MB zone test.

The A8V Deluxe and AV8 perform similarly in our Serial ATA tests, but there are a few things to note. First, the A8V Deluxe's Promise RAID controller yields lower burst speeds than the VT8237's integrated south bridge SATA, perhaps because the Promise controller must wrestle for limited PCI bus bandwidth with other devices. The Promise controller redeems itself with slightly higher average write speeds, though.

I wouldn't get too worried about the A8V Deluxe's slightly higher CPU utilization with SATA drives on the VT8237. HD Tach 3.01 claims CPU utilization accuracy of +/- 2%, so we're well within the margin of error.