GIGABYTE Z97X-SOC Force Motherboard Review
Intel Z97 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 Z97X-SOC Force SuperSpeed USB 3.0 performance wasn’t quite up to the task of keeping up with the ASUS Z97-Pro [Wi-Fi ac]. The Z97X-SOC Force hit 399.6MB/s sequential read and 342.1MB/s sequential write. The ASUS Z97 Pro [Wi-Fi ac] hit 428.3MB/s and 379.7MB/s when running without any of the ASUS special features enabled.
Update: Since we saw such a large gain in SATA performance from enabling the High Performance power option, figured I’d give it a go with the USB 3.0 testing as well. By simply enabling the High Performance Power option I saw a gain of 12MB/s on the Sequential Read and 6.5MB/s on the Sequential Write
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 Z97X-SOC Force hit 231.6MB/s average read and 224.0MB/s average read in HD Tune 5.50.
Update: Once the High Performance mode was enabled in the Windows Power Options, the GIGABYTE Z97X-SOC Force pegged the performance of HD Tune to the same as the ASUS Z97 Pro [Wi-Fi ac] and saw a 18.4MB/s average read gain over the balanced mode!