Sandra Testing Continued
Our final sythectic test of the MSI 790FX-GD70 featuring SiSoft Sandra focuses on memory bandwidth. This test uses batches of data to test the speed of memory and how much bandwidth it affords a CPU. The MSI board once again is on par with the numbers posted by the ASUS and GIGABYTE boards. Though this may seem rather redundant, this shows that the MSI board performs just as well as the other boards while still costing slightly less money.
Hard Drive I/O Remains Strange
It all started with our AMD platform showdown article. The hard drive tests we ran showed a significant drop in performance between the old and new chipsets AMD was using in its platforms. Since then we’ve been searching for a board that broke the trend. In the end this is going to result in a separate article, but for now let’s see if the MSI board can break the mould.
Since I wanted to get a general idea of hard drive performance before testing a few specific aspects, I decided to run the Hard Disk Drive test in PCMark Vantage first. The MSI board posted the lowest score of the three in hard drive I/O, though only by a decrease of 1.5%. For the most part it’s still inline with what we’ve come to expect from 790FX based boards.
Turning once again to SiSoftware Sandra, I then tested the raw performance and speed of our Kingston V-Series SSD hard drive. Since we now have the use of SSD drives to push the onboard controller, any weaknesses should be much more noticeable.
The MSI board was pretty well as fast as the GIGABYTE board used in our full time test bed, and about 3% slower then the ASUS board. These numbers still aren’t quite in the triple digits where they should be, but these are respectable transfer rates and basically the speed for most any 790FX based motherboard.
These performance numbers do seem to trend inline with the Access Time results posted by each motherboard. The MSI board came up the slowest in Access Time, though by a once again insignificant number. Overall the MSI board does look like a good value board, but we still have one more round of tests to perform.