MSI Z87 XPower Motherboard Review

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The native Z87 SATA 6Gb/s port allows our Kingston HyperX 3K SSD to show if its full performance potential.

Unfortunately, the SATA 6Gb/s ports wired to ASMedia's ASM1061 connection show far more constrained performance. The decrease in transfer rates is related to the fact that the ASMedia chip uses a single 5Gb/s PCI-E 2.0 lane to power two SATA ports which are supposedly capable of up to 6Gb/s each.

Shown above is the importance of using the chipset's native SATA 6Gb/s ports for maximum performance. If all of the Z87 SATA ports are being utilised, we would recommend using the ASMedia connections for lower priority devices such as optical drives and mechanical HDDs.

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