USB performance
For the USB tests, I used a DiamondMax D740X hard drive in a USB 2.0-compatible enclosure and, you guessed it, HDTach with an 8MB zone size.

NVIDIA's USB passes this basic competency test with flying colors.

Audio performance

Here's the slightly higher overhead in NVIDIA's audio drivers. As we've noted in the past, it's possible that the additional overhead from NVIDIA's drivers is due to a superior 3D positional audio algorithm. Unfortunately, we haven't yet tested that theory. The NVIDIA driver does support more buffers than the latest RealTek driver, which we used on the nForce4 AMD board.