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SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth

The DFI crown for stock memory bandwidth performance has definitely fallen. The ECS KN1 sees a clear ~30 MB/s lead over the second-fastest DFI LanParty UT nF4 Ultra-D. The two Gigabyte boards trail considerably behind. It looks as if ECS has taken the time to optimize their BIOS/chipset registers for optimal memory bandwidth.

HDTach

HDTach IDE performance is nothing to get excited about. Burst read and average read numbers are consisted across all of our motherboards. CPU utilization is the deciding factor, and the KN1 takes last place along with the Ultra-D, though the delta between most efficient and least efficient IDE controller is a mere 3% CPU.

SATA performance is even more of a sleeper. There just doesn't seem to be much of a variance between any of our nForce 4 motherboards. The KN1 takes middle place, again due to the CPU utilization deciding factor.

USB 2.0 performance is finally an area in which we can get some useful readings. Our SLI DFI board, as well as Gigabyte's K8NXP-SLI take first place with their respective 2.0% CPU utilizations, while the ECS KN1 and Gigabyte K8N Ultra-SLI duke it out for the next placement. The Ultra-D comes in last at 10%.