ECS X79R-AX Black Series Motherboard Review

Intel X79 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Performance

Intel X79 Motherboard SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Controller Chips:

• ECS X79R-AX Black Extreme – Texas Instruments TUSB7340 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Controller
• 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 ECS X79R-AX Black Extreme didn’t fare to well in our SuperSpeed USB 3.0 performance testing. The ECS X79R-AX Black Extreme uses a Texas Instruments TUSB7340 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 controller, the average read speed wasn’t to far off, but the Average Write speeds were more that 100MB/s behind the ASUS Rampage IV Extreme which is using an ASMedia USB 3.0 controller.

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.

ECS X79R-AX Black Extreme Intel X79 HD Tune Pro 4.61 Write Benchmark Results

ECS X79R-AX Black Extreme Intel X79 HD Tune Pro 4.61 Read Benchmark Results

Benchmark Results: The results in HD Tune 4.61 are comparable to what we saw in CrystalDiskMark. The Average Read speed of the ECS X79R-AX Black Extreme was behind our other boards, but not to far. The X79R-AX was ~35MB/s behind the ASUS R4E but only 2.8MB/s behind the GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD7. The Average Write was once again significantly slower than our other systems. With an Average Write speed of 115.8MB/s the ECS X79R-AX was 128.4MB/s slower than the ASUS Rampage IV Extreme and 84.3MB/s behind the GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD7.