ASUS P7P55D Deluxe Lynnfield Motherboard Review

I/O Benchmarks

A first here at Hardware Canucks, we have finally included some basic I/O benchmarks. We love to hear your thoughts and ideas about what to implement and whether we should expand to include LAN and audio tests, so let us know on the forums.

HD Tach 3.0.4 - SATA

For this benchmark, HDTach was used. It shows the potential read speed which you are likely to experience with an Intel X25-M 80GB G1 solid state drive (SSD) on this motherboard. The long test was run to give a slightly more accurate picture. The test was run three times with the results averaged out.

We don’t put much stock in Burst speed readings and this goes double for SSDs; the more important number is the Average Speed number. This number will tell you what to expect from a given drive in normal, day to day operations. The higher the average the faster your entire system will seem.

We also test CPU utilization in order to make sure that there isn't a problem needlessly wasting CPU cycles. Lastly, we have also included the random access time, just as another barometer of overall storage sub-system performance. In both cases, the lower the better.


Although the Intel board exhibited higher burst speed (and read the description for our thoughts on burst speed), the P7P55D Deluxe was roughly 5MB/s faster when it came to average read speed. A small, but noteworthy difference.



We are glad to see that both motherboards have identical CPU utilization and random access times, clearly both models are functioning optimally.

HD Tach 3.0.4 - USB

For this benchmark, HDTach was used. It shows the potential read speed which you are likely to experience from this motherboard's USB 2.0 ports. In this test, we connected an external 2.5" 5400RPM hard drive to a USB port, ran the test three times and averaged the results. The long test was run to give a slightly more accurate picture.

We don’t put much stock in Burst speed readings; the more important number is the Average Speed number. This number will tell you what to expect from a given drive in normal, day to day operations. The higher the average the faster your entire system will seem.

We also test CPU utilization in order to make sure that there isn't a problem needlessly wasting CPU cycles. Lastly, we have also included the random access time, just as another barometer of overall storage sub-system performance. In both cases, the lower the better.


Our external 2.5" hard drive can easily saturate the USB 2.0 interface, and it performed identically on both motherboards.


Once again, both the ASUS and Intel motherboards perform identically, with a statistically irrelevant access time advantage going to the P7P55D Deluxe.

HD Tach 3.0.4 - eSATA

For this benchmark, HDTach was used. It shows the potential read speed which you are likely to experience from this motherboard's eSATA port with an Intel X25-M G1 80GB solid state drive. with these hard drives. The long test was run to give a slightly more accurate picture. The test was run three times with the results averaged out.

We don’t put much stock in Burst speed readings and this goes double for SSDs; the more important number is the Average Speed number. This number will tell you what to expect from a given drive in normal, day to day operations. The higher the average the faster your entire system will seem.

We also test CPU utilization in order to make sure that there isn't a problem needlessly wasting CPU cycles. Lastly, we have also included the random access time, just as another barometer of overall storage sub-system performance. In both cases, the lower the better.


Finally, a tangible performance difference. The P7P55D Deluxe does not have an eSATA port on its rear I/O panel. Instead, it relies on an expansion bracket with an eSATA port that connects to the motherboard's black SATA port. This black SATA port is supplied by the JMicron JMB363 SATA & PATA controller. The Intel motherboard on the other hand does have eSATA ports on its rear I/O panel, and those are supplied by a Marvell 88E6145 SATA controller. As you can see by these results, clearly the JMicron solution is the faster of the two, boasting 10MB/s faster average read speeds.


From these results, we can see that the P7P55D Deluxe has slightly higher CPU utilization when eSATA is being used, but it's a mere 1% difference. The access times are identical as when the SSD is plugged into the proper SATA ports, which is an impressive demonstration of eSATA's capabilities.