What Is The Best Sub-$100 Intel Z77 Motherboard? Find Out In Our Roundup!

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: Much like on the previous page, all three of our Intel Z77 budget boards are taking advantage of the same technology. The ASRock Z77 Pro3, BIOSTAR TZ77B, and GIGABYTE Z77-DS3H all take advantage of the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 technology present on the Intel Z77 chipset. So we aren’t shocked that there is minimal differences between the boards. Looking at the sequential read speeds, they all hovered in the 246MB/s-250MB/s range with the GIGABYTE Z77-DS3H edging out the competition.

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: No real surprises in HD Tune either, the performance across all of our boards was pretty uniform. The GIGABYTE Z77-DS3H did manage to pull away slightly in both the average read and average write tests.