ECS Z77H2-AX ‘Golden Board’ Intel Z77 Motherboard Review

Intel Z77 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: Remarkably the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 testing results are nearly identical across the Intel Z77 boards. We aren’t seeing as much variation anymore thanks to Intel implementing USB 3.0 technology on the Intel Z77 express chipset. With that being said, the ECS Z77H2-AX Black Extreme was able to hit a Sequential Read of 264.1MB/s and a Sequential Write of 253.9MB/s. As mentioned above there isn’t much variation between the boards and the ECS Z77H2-AX falls right in line.

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 Z77 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 HD Tune 4.61 Read Benchmark Results

Intel Z77 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 HD Tune 5.00 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 ECS Z77H2-AX Black Extreme was a little bit lower than our other boards in HD Tune 5.0. The ECS Z77H2-AX had an Average Read of 269.7MB/s which is anywhere from ~5MB/s to~8MB/s slower than most of our boards. The ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe continues to dominate the field in both the Average Read and Average Write and was nearly 30MB/s faster than the ECS Z77H2-AX Black Extreme. The ECS Z77H2-AX Black Extreme had an Average Write of 261.3MB/s which falls into the middle of the pack.