We have just published our review of the Abit AX78. This is their budget AM2+ motherboard, which does fully support Phenom processors and Crossfire X. For just around $90, it performs pretty well, and overclocks.. well, read for yourself ;)
The major issue with the AX78 is that it uses what is essentially a flawed Southbridge chipset to begin with. The years-old ATI SB600 has always had problems with USB and SATA performance, and AHCI is essentially broken. Once you get past that though, it’s a pretty good effort by Universal Abit.
Got any plans for showing some real-world performance numbers comparing the different AHCI options?
You can take the performance you see in the review and attribute it to any benchmarks you want. For instance, transferring files is going to slow down the rest of the system, and USB transfer is going to be really slow. Any programs that require a lot of heavy HDD usage will be affected as well.
I’m not really concerned about benchmark numbers that may or may not show what kind of impact this may or may not have on my usage, I’m more interested in comparing what I’m actually going to see while using this board.
Then you can read the rest of the review… Plenty of real world apps were used, all in IDE mode.
I think you’re missing the point. I’m asking how these different implementations will affect overall system responsiveness (i.e. boot times, level load times in games, application startup times, etc.)