USB performance
Our USB transfer speed tests were conducted with a USB 2.0/Firewire external hard drive enclosure connected to a 7200RPM Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 hard drive. We tested with HD Tach 3.01's 8MB zone setting.

Although it uses the same nForce Pro 2200 USB controller as the Asus board, the NFPIK8AA's USB performance is a little sluggish.

Firewire performance
Our Firewire transfer speed tests were conducted with the same external enclosure and hard drive as our USB transfer speed tests. We don't have a 1394b enclosure in the labs, so testing was confined to the NFPIK8AA's 1394a Firewire ports. Expect 1394b to offer better performance, provided the peripheral device is fast enough to take advantage of the standard's additional interface bandwidth.

Firewire performance is largely consistent between the two boards, at least with 1394a. The K8N-DL lacks support for 1394b, though.