ASUS Z87-Pro Intel Z87 LGA1150 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 ASUS Z87-Pro was faster than all of the boards with the exception of the ASUS ROG Maximus VI Hero. With and average of 421.2MB/s sequential read and 373.6MB/s sequential write it proves that ASUS has SuperSpeed USB 3.0 performance in the bag. The ASUS Z87-Pro also uses an ASMedia ASM1061 USB 3.0 controller, it was able to average 394.8 Sequential read and 345.5MB/s sequential write. Still a solid performance from the ASMedia controller, but not quite on par with the Intel Z87 Chipset.

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 ASUS Z87-Pro hit 250.0MB/s average read and 238.0MB/s average, once again it was outperformed by only another ASUS motherboard. If it wasn’t for the ROG Maximus VI Hero the ASUS Z87-Pro would have been on the top of the charts with the best performance.