GIGABYTE Z87X-UD5 TH Intel Z87 Thunderbolt 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 GIGABYTE Z87X-UD5 TH was a hair behind the top board, though only by 2.2MB/s on the sequential read which was still golden at 409.8MB/s while the sequential write took up the bottom spot for the Z87 platform with 339.0MB/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 Z87 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 HD Tune 5.50 Read Benchmark Results

Intel Z87 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: The GIGABYTE Z87X-UD5 TH hit an average read of 237.9MB/s and an average write of 214.0MB/s. The performance wasn’t the best I’ve ever seen but it was still plenty respectable.