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Asus P9X79 Pro motherboard USB 3.0 poor speeds

ZoltarTheGreat
Level 7

I have a P9X79 Pro motherboard in my secondary PC. This is a PC I built in 2012 and upgraded over the years with different components. It’s still a fast PC and the things it cannot do because of the old CPU, such as encoding HEVC are done by the RTX3060 card in it.

Now, the motherboard has 4 USB 3.0 ports in the back. I know that USB 3.0 speeds can be up to around 500 MBps, so I figured I would get an external SSD for it, even if the SSD is faster than 500 MBps, still a decent speed. So I got a 2 TB Crucial X9 drive, which I tested in my Mac Studio and it benchmarked close to 900 MBps, so I assumed when connected to my PC that it would benchmark at close to 500 MBps. 

To my surprise, it wouldn’t go over 230 MBps or so. I think it was formatted as exFAT, so I formatted it as NTFS just to try, and it was slower, not too much, but slower nonetheless. So I went back to exFAT, which at least allows me to connect it to both Mac and PC.

I tried all the USB 3 ports in my PC, and it wasn’t going over 230 MBps. Yesterday it occurred to me that I hadn’t installed the actual Asus drivers for the motherboard, so I did that, not just the USB ones but the ones that were showing for Windows 10 64 bit. That took care of some components in the device manager that were showing as absent. After rebooting and running CrystalDisk Mark again, not only the speed didn’t improve, now they are down to slghtly over hard drive levels, at 174 MBps. So rather pathetic.

Searching online I did everything I found for troubleshooting, including changing the policy from Quick removal to Better performance, which achieved nothing. Now it doesn’t even let me change it back if I wanted to. 

Now, I’m fully aware that this is a 12 year old motherboard, so I’m not asking for anything it wasn’t supposed to have when I bought it in 2012. I’m not asking for USB 3.1 or 3.2. I’m expecting USB 3.0 speeds, and that’s supposed to be 500 MBps. So what’s wrong here?

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