Peripheral testing
So here's an interesting graph. The ASRock is way ahead of the competition and busting past the accepted 40MB/s ceiling for USB 2.0-connected drives. The reason for this performance rests with the XFast USB application. The company doesn't divulge exactly what's happening behind the scenes to affect such an improvement, though we can presume that there's optimisation of the USB protocol to enhance sustained read and write speeds.
We're using a 160GB, 7,200rpm drive for this test. It also boosts the straight-line speed for thumb drives, too. Running the test without the app brings performance down to 35.2MB/s. Also, we fully understand that other companies also offer comparative technology - Gigabyte's USB Turbo, for example - and we'd need to re-bench everything for accurate results. Take this more as an indication that ASRock is putting focus in the right places.
Back to normality for USB 3.0, however.