Testing (continued):

HD Tach RW 3.0.4.0

Simpli Software's HD Tach is dedicated to testing hard drive performance, and provides a variety of information (higher is better for all but access time and CPU utilization). Once again I was expecting the ECS A770M-A to outperform the Asus M2N32-SLI motherboard. The Asus M3A motherboard's scores were closer to the ECS A770M-A than the memory scores were, and in fact the M3A did perform slightly better than the ECS A770M-A in the areas of CPU utilization and Random Access Time.


Sisoft Sandra Xii

While Sisoft Sandra has many different benchmarks, I opted to use Sandra to execute only the CPU Arithmetic test. Memory has little consequence in this benchmark as it focuses on the CPU.


As I expected, the Asus M2N32-SLI motherboard received the lowest scores. However, this is the first time that the Asus M3A motherboard received better scores; at least on one of the two benchmarks. While the Asus M3A surpassed the ECS A770M-A motherboard on the Whetstone (MFLOPS) test; the ECS A770M-A motherboard was better on the Dhrystone (MIPS) test.