At first the lines appeared to be drawn down manufacturers lines; GIGABYTE chose to use a digital switching mechanism and ASUS chose to add an additional bridge chip from PLX. The lines became blurred when it came to light that ASUS also used a switch on the P7P55D-E and P7P55-E LX, similar to GIGABYTEs method. For all of the marketing that came from ASUS, their IO Level UP appears nearly identical to what GIGABYTE has done on their P55A boards.

The first shot in the marketing war was clearly fired by ASUS; reviewers were getting hit with digital fire before we even saw a SATA 6G hard drive or USB 3.0 drive enclosure. Today we are going to look past the marketing and take a look at two motherboards and see how they perform with SATA 6G.