Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 LGA1366 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 X-25M 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.


Interestingly, our X-25M consistently achieved a higher average read speed on the X58A-UD7 than on the Rampage II Extreme. In fact, although both boards posted the same burst speeds, the RIIE never even broke the 180MB/s mark in average speed during our repeated testing.


Both models achieved identical CPU utilization at 2%, and super 0.1ms access times courtesy of the Intel X25-M G1 SSD.

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.


USB read speeds are very much identical across the board.


Once again, the results are pretty much identical, with any differences attributable to normal benchmark variance.

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 X-25M 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.


The X58A-UD7 and Rampage II Extreme both utilize the same JMicron JMB362 controller for eSATA support, and as such they achieve nearly performance levels.


Despite using the same controller, the Gigabyte board consistently had much higher CPU utilization than the ASUS when benchmarking the eSATA interface.