Intel Core i5-760 and ECS P55H-AK Review

SATA 3 / USB 3 (Motherboard)

It is becoming standard for motherboards to feature SATA 6GB/s and USB 3.0 controllers and on the Intel platforms that usually means Marvells 9128 SATA controller with the NECs USB chipset. As we discussed earlier the ECS board has two of each controller and includes a PLEX PCIe switch to provide additional lanes for peak performance of SATA 6GB/s drives and USB 3.0 devices.

To test the performance of this configuration we connected a Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB to the 6GB/s ports on our P55H-AK and P55A-UD3R then retested the same drive on the 3GB/s limited P55-UD6.

Next we took a Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB drive and placed it in a USB 3.0 dock before connecting this to our USB 3.0 ports, USB 2.0 on the P55-UD6.

In each test the benefits of the newer P55 boards are very clear, they finish 100MB/s ahead of a SATA 2 based board in terms of read speed. Looking at USB 3.0 vs. 2.0 the NEC based boards are 70-105MB/s faster than the older technology.

In the comparison between the ECS and Gigabyte boards we can see that the P55H-AK just edges ahead of the P55A, offering some of the fastest SATA 6GB/s and USB 3.0 speeds we have seen to date.