ASRock Z77E-ITX Mini ITX Motherboard Review

ASRock XFast 555

The ASRock Z77E-ITX mini-ITX motherboard can take full advantage of the ASRock XFast 555 technology. The ASRock XFast 555 technology consists of XFast RAM, XFast USB, and XFast LAN. Today we are going to take a look at the XFast 555 technology and performance of the XFast USB and XFast RAM.

ASRock Z77E-ITX XFast USB Technology

Once we installed the software for the XFast USB, it was simple to use. Simply click it over to Turbo, it will ask you unplug the device and plug it back in. Once that is done, you are ready to rock.

We tested the XFast USB technology on both of the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 controllers on the ASRock Z77E-ITX mini-ITX motherboards. The most significant differences were on the sequential read speeds. The Intel Z77 controller had a sequential read speed of 249.5MB/s before the XFast software was installed, once we installed the software and enable the ‘Turbo’ mode we saw the sequential read speed increase to 400.9MB/s! That’s a gain of 151.4MB/s or 60.7%. The ASMedia controller jumped from 222.4MB/s to 339.1MB/s, a gain of 116.7MB/s or 52.5%! Both of the controllers saw a significant gain in sequential read performance in CrystalDiskMark.

ASRock Z77E-ITX XFast RAM Technology

We fired up the ASRock AXTU software so we could toy with the ASRock XFast RAM. The ASRock XFast RAM allows you to create a virtual disk from your system memory. Through the AXTU software you can determine what the system does with the virtual drive. The set up of the virtual drive was real easy with the AXTU software, within moments we had set up a 1Gb partition from our Corsair Vengeance memory.

Needless to say, a virtual disk from our Corsair Vengeance memory was significantly faster than any of our SSD’s, our sequential read speed hit 7242MB/s while our sequential write speed hit 6892MB/s! That’s 14.8 times faster than our Corsair Force GT 240Gb SSD which hit a sequential read speed of 488.8MB/s!