To test a motherboard’s onboard audio solution’s abilities we have used RightMark Audio Analyzer.
These results are a tad disappointing, but are still better than what you will usually find in this price bracket. This is all thanks to electronically separating the audio portion of the board from the rest of the system…now if only MSI had included a couple dollar op-amp we would have been a lot happier.
MSI 970A SLI KRAIT – USB 3.1 Performance
For the USB 3.1 device we have used an Asus USB 3.1 enclosure. This enclosure uses a pair of Samsung 840 EVO 250GB drives in a simple RAID 0 configuration, and is powered by an ASMedia ASM1352R chipset.
To help replicate worse case real world scenarios we have devised a real world test consisting of copying to and from the devices, using MS RichCopy and logging the performance of the drive. Unlike most of our tests this is a two part test, with two parts to each. The first test was to transfer a 20.00GB contiguous file to and from the external USB 3.1 enclosure. The second test consists of copying to and from a folder containing hundreds of subfolders containing files varying in length for a grand total of 20 GB total.
It is a shame that USB 3.1 external storage solutions are both expensive and hard to find – as the results do speak for themselves! Honestly USB 3.1 will change people’s opinion on USB being a slow standard and having it available on such an inexpensive motherboard like the 970 SLI KRAIT just proves that USB 3.1 is not going to be a flash in the pan – like ThunderBolt has proven to be.
