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.

USB performance has always been a problem for ATI's SB450 south bridge, so the KA1 MVP really suffers in this test. Note that in addition to having extremely poor transfer rates, CPU utilization is also rather high.

Firewire performance
Our Firewire transfer speed tests were conducted with the same external enclosure and hard drive as our USB transfer speed tests.

The KA1 MVP fares better in our Firewire tests than it did with USB. However, note that the ECS and DFI boards get hung up in the write speed test. Both mate PCI-based Firewire chips with the SB450 south bridge, and their poor performance hints at the SB450's PCI problems.