Testing – SATA, USB & Network
To test SATA, M.2, and USB speeds we make use of CrystalDiskMark hard drive benchmarking tool. First up is our SATA drive which is a the Crucial MX 200 500GB drive.
For the M.2 test we will be using the Western Digital WD Black NVMe drive. We installed this drive in the bottom M.2 slot which has PCIe x4 speeds.
For the USB 3.1 tests we also use CrystalDiskMark. We actually decided to use a the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD and test both the Gen 1 and Gen 2 ports. Gen 1 is on the left and gen 2 is on the right.
To test the network adapter performance we use Sandra’s Network (LAN) benchmark.
Power consumption for a system is of course very important. To measure power consumption I used a killawatt meter. The idle test is taken on the Windows 10 desktop and the load test is taken while running AIDA64’s system stability test with GPU’s enabled. Remember these values are for the entire system.
