ASUS Rampage IV Extreme Motherboard Review

ASUS Rampage IV Extreme Intel X79 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Performance

Intel X79 Motherboard SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Controller Chips:

• ASUS Rampage IV Extreme – ASMedia ASM1042 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Controller
• GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD7 – Fresco FL1009 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Controller

CrystalDiskMark is a small benchmark utility for drives and enables rapid measurement of sequential and random read/write speeds. Note that CDM only supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32 (as noted) for the last listed benchmark score. This can skew some results in favor of controllers that also do not support NCQ.

The SuperSpeed USB 3.0 performance testing was done using a Corsair Force GT 240GB SSD.

Benchmark Results: The ASUS Rampage IV Extreme was able to outperform the GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD7 by a pretty solid margin. The Sequential Read of the ASUS Rampage IV Extreme was a respectable 222.7MB/s while the GIGABYTE averaged 209.5MB/s. The Margin for the Sequential Write was even greater. The ASUS Rampage IV Extreme was able to hit 238.7MB/s while the GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD7 averaged only 202.5MB/s.

HD Tune Pro 4.01 is an extended version of HD Tune which includes
many new features such as write benchmark, secure erasing, AAM setting,
folder usage view, disk monitor, command line parameters and file
benchmark.

ASUS Rampage IV Extreme Intel X79 HD Tune Pro 4.61 Write Benchmark Results

ASUS Rampage IV Extreme Intel X79 HD Tune Pro 4.61 Read Benchmark Results

Benchmark Results: Once again the ASUS Rampage IV Extreme was able to dominate the GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD7 SuperSpeed USB 3 performance. The Average Read of the Rampage IV Extreme was 234.3MB/s while the GIGABYTE X79-UD7 averaged 202.3MB/s, a performance gap of 15.8%! The Average Write was an even larger margin, the ASUS Rampage IV Extreme averaged 244.2MB/s which is 22% faster than the 200.1MB/s averaged by the GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD7.