ECS GANK Drone Z87H3-A3X L337 Gaming 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 ECS GANK Drone Z87H3-A3X was able to hit a sequential read of 412.0MB/s and a sequential write of 348.1MB/s. The average read is faster than our other boards, but the write speed is 10MB/s behind the G1.Sniper 5 from GIGABYTE.

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 5.50 Read Benchmark Results

Intel Z77 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 ECS GANK Drone Z87H3-A3X was able to best all of our other boards in HD Tune. The Average read was tied with the ECS Z87H3-A2X at 250MB/s, the average read was sitting at 239.2MB/s, ~1.6MB/s faster.