Thunderbolt tests
There's manifestly little point in reviewing a Thunderbolt-equipped board and then not even taking a cursory look at the standout feature.
We used the Western Digital VelociRaptor Duo external drive storage and ran one of the 1TB, 3.5in, 10,000RPM (WD1000DHTZ) drives connected by Thunderbolt and, representing the gold standard, directly attached to the SATA6Gbps port.
Both data conduits provide very healthy numbers in the sequential tests
Pushing the interface further, we then ran the tortuous 4K test - which takes forever - and found that SATA had a single-digit percentage advantage over Thunderbolt.
Of course, Gigabyte could have chosen to integrate eSATA on the backplane and minimised the board cost.
That cooling
Gigabyte makes lofty claims about the quality of its component cooling. Now, unfortunately, we don't have access to thermal-imaging cameras, but we can take a perfunctory look at performance by aiming an infrared thermometer at the choke section of the board when running Prime95 for 10 minutes. Here's how they pan out.
The Gigabyte board's chokes remain a little cooler than ASUS' when under load.