Benchmarks: storage
Storage revealed a couple of interesting results. Firstly, the 970 chipset boards are about 70-100MB/s behind Z97 chipset boards in SATA read and write. That's a margin that isn't going to have much impact in the real world, but if storage importance matters, then it could well be an influencing factor.
Secondly, the USB performance on the MSI 970 Gaming is weak. Putting a finger on the problem is difficult since both 970 chipset boards use similar VIA USB 3.0 controllers. The Gigabyte 970A-DS3P uses VIA VL805 and the MSI 970 Gaming uses the VIA VL806.Other reviews deliver a similar figure of 110MB/s for the MSI 970 Gaming but that leaves the higher-than-expected performance on the Gigabyte motherboard unaccounted for. Strange indeed.
