USB performance
Our USB transfer speed tests were conducted with a USB 2.0/Firewire external hard drive enclosure connected to a 7200RPM Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 hard drive. We tested with HD Tach 3.01's 8MB zone setting.

AMD has done well bolstering the SB700's USB performance. The new south bridge is a little slower than Intel's best in our burst and sustained read speed tests, but much quicker when it comes to writing, with competitive CPU utilization.

PCI Express performance
We used ntttcp to test PCI Express Ethernet throughput using a Marvell 88E8052-based PCI Express x1 Gigabit Ethernet card.

These two boards' PCI Express GigE throughput is all but identical, although the AMD platform has an advantage in CPU utilization. The 780G system also has two cores running at 2.5GHz, while G35's dually is clocked 500MHz slower at 2GHz.

PCI performance
To test PCI performance, we used the same ntttcp test methods and a PCI VIA Velocity GigE NIC.

I'm at a loss to explain this one, folks. For whatever reason, our G35 Express board doesn't get along with the older VIA networking card we use for PCI throughput testing. This particular card has delivered much better performance on other motherboards that use the exact same ICH9R south bridge, so I'm more inclined to write this off as an odd motherboard incompatibility rather than a flaw in the G35 chipset. Forget about the CPU utilization results, too; with such disproportionate throughput, we can't draw many conclusions here.

Despite the 780G's obvious throughput lead, 650Mbps isn't particularly impressive. We've seen this card pushing 730-840Mbps on other platforms, making me wonder if perhaps the SB700 has inherited its predecessor's pokey PCI performance characteristics.