Subsystem Testing
Memory Bandwidth
With our DDR4-4400MHz CL19 memory kit in Gear 2 mode, memory bandwidth on read performance is at 64.7GB/s and write performance is 62.4GB/s and copy performance is 59.3GB/s. This is very high bandwidth and shows how much can be had from DDR4-4400MHz on the Intel platform, even if it is running Gear 2. These bandwidth numbers are about 10GB/s higher than the AMD Ryzen platform with similar settings, so this RAM kit and this motherboard is doing excellent on memory performance and latencies.
LatencyMon
According to LatencyMon the Highest measured interrupt to process latency is 430 after five minutes. This is a middle-of-the-road number, our recent review of the BIOSTAR Z590I VALKYRIE had an excellent number at 161, however that is an ITX motherboard, and this one is an ATX with more hardware and features. If you look at that graph linked, 430 sits about in the middle, better than some Z490 boards, and some X570 boards.
M.2 Performance
This motherboard has three M.2 slots, but only the top primary slot supports PCIe 4.0 NVMe as it pulls its lanes from the CPU with 11th Gen Intel Core CPUs, the other two support PCIe 3.0 and pull their lanes from the chipset. To test the M.2 slot performance we used an MSI SPATIUM M480 2TB HS PCIe 4.0 Gen4 NVMe SSD. This SSD is rated at 7000MB/s (7GB/s) read speeds and 6800MB/s (6.8GB/s) write speeds.
The above performance is on the primary M.2 slot, and it shows that PCI-Express 4.0 is working great on this motherboard, we are getting the full performance of our SSD on this slot.
In the above screenshot, our SSD is now installed in the third M.2 slot, and it is maxing it out at the full PCI-Express 3.0 performance, we are getting the full performance out of this M.2 slot.
USB Performance
This motherboard has several USB ports, and two high-speed ports based on the newer generation of USB performance. There is one 10Gbps Type-A USB port and one Type-C 20Gbps port. We do not have a device that can max out the 20Gbps Type-C port, but we can at least test both ports with an SSD on the M.2 slot and transfer files and test performance on both USB ports to make sure they work good and are capable of their rated speeds. To do this, we put a SAMSUNG 980 PRO 512GB SSD on an external controller with a Type-A and a Type-C cable and let CrystalDiskMark roar.
This is in the 10Gbps Type-A port, and this shows that we are maxing out the port at the full performance as it should, 1000MB/s or 1GB/s.
As we mentioned, the external device we are using has a maximum performance of 10Gbps, so in the above screenshot, it is now connected to the Type-C port which can technically do 20Gbps. We can at least see here that it is operating normally and can max out 10Gbps just fine.