ECS Z87H3-A2X Extreme Motherboard Review

Intel Z87 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 ECS Z87H3-A2X Extreme SuperSpeed USB 3.0 performance wasn’t as dominating as the SATA III performance, but it wasn’t far off from the ASUS Z87-Pro. The Z87H3-A2X Extreme had a sequential read of 409.1MB/s, not quite up to the ASUS Z87-Pro speed of 421.2MB/s, but still solid. The ECS Z87H3-A2X sequential write was a little further back with a performance of 345.3MB/s compared to the ASUS performance of 373.6MB/s.

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 5.50 Read Benchmark Results

Intel Z77 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: HD Tune looks like a wash between the ECS Z87H3-A2X and the ASUS Z87-Pro. There is no discernible difference between their performances.