ASUS Z97-Pro Wi-Fi AC Intel Z97 Motherboard Review

Intel Z97 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Performance Testing

There are a number of different Super Speed USB 3.0 host controllers out there. In order to know which ones perform the best we run a series of tests that will put the controller through the ringer and see how it comes out on the other side. Each of our motherboards uses a different Super Speed USB 3.0 controller and you can find the below.

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.

Testing of the USB3 was done using the “Thermaltake BlacX 5G Hard Drive Docking Station . The drive used was an Corsair Force GT 240Gb SSD.

Benchmark Results: The ASUS Z97-Pro [Wi-Fi ac] was able to edge out the GIGABYTE Z87X-UD5TH by a rather solid performance margin in CrystalDiskMark when using the SuperSpeed USB 3.0.

HD Tune Pro 5.00 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.

Intel Z87 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 HD Tune 5.50 Read Benchmark Results

Intel Z87 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 HD Tune 5.50 Write Benchmark Results

Testing of the USB3 was done using the “Thermaltake BlacX 5G Hard Drive Docking Station . The drive used was an Corsair Force GT 240Gb SSD.

Benchmark Results: The ASUS Z97-Pro [Wi-Fi ac] was able to hit 250MB/s average read and 239.2MB/s average write in HD Tune 5.5.