Motherboard peripheral performance — continued

Serial ATA performance

There are two lessons to be learned from our Serial ATA results. The Z77's SATA performance is pretty consistent from one board to the next. It's also notably faster than the auxiliary ASMedia solution found on the Asus and MSI mobos. Only use those auxiliary SATA ports as a last resort.

Ethernet performance

FileBench works for network transfers, too. There isn't much difference in movie transfer speeds. However, the Atheros Gigabit Ethernet controller on the Gigabyte board offers better performance in the mixed tests. That's particularly notable because the Asus and MSI boards both use Intel GigE chips. The system at the other end of the CAT6 cable in these tests is also based on an Intel network controller.

There is a catch, of course. The Z77X-UD3H's CPU utilization is a little higher than the others in the NTttcp throughput test. I'd happily trade 2.5% of the Core i7-2600K's CPU resources for faster network transfer speeds.

PCI Express performance

Our RevoDrive PCIe SSD is insanely fast on all the boards. The MSI is the only one to push CPU utilization into double-digit territory, but we're only talking about a difference of a few percentage points versus the rest of the field.

Analog audio signal quality

According to RMAA's loopback test, the MSI Z77A-GD65 has better overall analog signal quality than the others. The individual test results are pretty close, though. If you're really worried about analog signal quality, you're better off with a discrete sound card. If you're not, features like speaker virtualization and real-time encoding support may be more important to you than minute differences in frequency response or dynamic range.