ASUS Intel Z68 ROG Maximus IV Motherboard Reviews

Super Speed 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.

• ASUS ROG Maximus IV Extreme-Z – NEC USB 3.0 controller
• ASUS ROG Maximus IV Gene-Z – ASMedia USB 3.0 controller

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 OCZ Vertex 3 120GB SSD.

Benchmark Results: The ASUS ROG Maximus IV Gene-Z was able to edge out the Maximus IV Extreme-Z in our SuperSpeed USB 3.0 testing. With a sequential read of 233.5MB/s the Gene-Z was 19MB/s faster than the ASUS Maximus IV Extreme-Z, a difference of 8.9%. Sequential write speed told a similar story, the Maximus IV Gene-Z averaged 173.1MB/s while the Extreme-Z averaged 160.7MB/s which is a difference of 7.7%.

HD Tune Pro 4.01 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.

Testing of the USB3 was done using the Thermaltake BlacX 5G Hard Drive Docking Station. The drive used was an OCZ Vertex 3 120GB SSD.

Benchmark Results: Once again the Maximus IV Gene-Z came out on top. the Average Read of the Gene-Z was 249.0MB/s while the Extreme-Z was 211.9MB/s. Our Average writes were significantly different in HD Tune 4.61. The ASUS Maximus IV Gene-Z averaged 227.5MB/s while the Extreme-Z averaged only 127.4MB/s.