Gigabyte Z170X-UD5 ATX Motherboard Review

By Steven Kean August 27, 2015

Storage Media Performance

M.2

Testing the M.2 interface, we installed a second Kingston Predator M.2 PCIe G2x4 240GB drive into the second M.2 slot, M2D_32G that shares it’s bandwidth with the PCI-E x16 slot that runs at x4. Kingston rates this Predator SSD for 1400MB/s read and 600MB/s write with ATTO 2.41a. Let’s take a look at CrystalDiskMark and see how it rates the performance of the Kingston Predator M.2 SSD.

CrystalDiskMark 5.0.2 x64 gives the Predator a 1558MB/s read and 681.1MB/s write speed at it’s Sequential Queue Depth 32 test. Not too bad, always nice to see a drive perform higher than it’s rated speed. Also, for those that might be curious how it performs using the latest version of ATTO (version 3.05), it received similar scores as CrystalDiskMark; 1565MB/s Read and 671MB/s Write.

SATA 6Gb/s

The Sandisk Ultra II is rated for 550MB/s and 500MB/s for it’s read and write speed. CrystalDiskMark gave it a 553.1MB/s read speed and 498.3 MB/s for the write speed. So within an acceptable tolerance for rated to actual results.

SuperSpeed USB 3.0

To these USB 3.0, we will connect a Thermaltake 5G USB dock and a Sandisk Ultra II 480GB SSD directly to the motherboards USB 3.0 ports on the back I/O cluster.

CrystalDiskMark 5.0.2 reports a Sequential speed of 405.1MB/s for the Read speed, and 315.0MB/s in the Write test. The Read speed is a little slower than we have seen in the past with this SSD, however the Write speed is about 100MB/s slower than previous tests.

Type-C

USB 3.1 is the newest USB revision, and unfortunately, nothing takes advantage of the increased bandwidth. So there is little point in testing this latest USB innovation at this time. Kingston provided us one of their MicroDuo 3C flash drives, that utilizes the Type-C connector, so we will do a quick test using that connector. Kingston rates this drive for 100MB/s Read and 15MB/s Write.

While the Kingston MicroDuo 3C isn’t the fastest flash drive around, it does have the Type-C connector. As this connection gains in popularity, we should see faster flash drives come out with the latest reversible USB connector. As it stands, the Gigabyte Z170X-UD5 looks to handle the Type-C connector rather well. CrystalDiskMark reported a slightly faster Read/Write speed than Kingston specifies for this drive. During testing, we ran the test with the flash drive in both orientations and received the same score no matter which way the flash drive was plugged into the Type-C connector; this is the nice thing about Type-C reversability without any loss of performance.