EVGA Z77 FTW 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: The EVGA Z77 FTW features two separate SuperSpeed USB 3.0 controllers. The first, as expected with the Intel Z77 chipset is from the Intel Z77 Chipset. The second is from an ASMedia ASM1042 controller. The Intel SuperSpeed USB 3.0 was able to outperform the ASMedia controller by 28MB/s in the sequential read tests with a speed of 259.5MB/s compared to the ASMedia read speed of 231.5MB/s. The write speeds were nearly identical to each other with a difference of only .5MB/s. Comparing the EVGA Z77 FTW to our other Intel Z77 motherboards, the Intel SuperSpeed USB 3.0 was slightly behind most of them, though only 2MB/s – ~5MB/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 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: In HD Tune, the results mimic what we saw in CrystalDiskMark. The Intel Z77 USB 3.0 Controller was quite a bit faster than the ASMedia ASM1042 controller, and right on par with our other Intel Z77 motherboards. The Intel Z77 controllers were separated by only a few MB/s. The ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe still reigns supreme and was nearly 35MB/s faster than the EVGA Z77 FTW.