Drive and Audio Performance Results

Our drive and audio testing differs a bit from the rest of our testing, for several reasons. First of all, when it comes to drive performance comparison, nearly every platform on the market is very close to one another, as most do provide external drive controllers which means the numbers offered are very much platform agnostic. And finally, with audio, we do not list any numbers except for those reported by the product we are testing in order to provide the most information possible, as each audio CODEC will behave quite differently, and each board does not employ the same CODEC. As such, there is no standard we can use other than the numbers themselves. You can always check our other motherboard reviews in order to make direct comparisons to audio performance.

We've tested each drive interface separately in order to provide the most complete numbers possible. Employing HDTune Pro for all of the testing, we tested each drive outside of the OS environment, using a separate OS on a separate drive. However, we do use drives with a fair amount of data on them (60% full) to simulate performance in real-world situations.

HDTune Pro (SATA2)

In HDTune Pro SATA 3 Gb/s performance, we found the ASRock Z77 Extreme9 to perform fairly well, faster than the Gigabyte G.1 Sniper M3, and ASUS P8Z77-V.

HDTune Pro (SATA 6Gb/s)

SATA 6 Gb/s showed a slightly similar picture, with the ASRock Z77 Extreme9 beating out three other Intel Z77 Express-based products.

HDTune Pro (USB3.0)

USB 3.0 drive performance tests are done using the same Corsair F60 drive used to test SATA 3 Gb/s performance, and here we got a very similar results, with the ASRock Z77 Extreme9 sitting at right in the middle of the graph, and just a single MB/s behind our best result ever, and this was without the XFast USB enabled, too!

RightMark Audio Analyzer

Audio testing using RightMark Audio Analyzer provided pretty average numbers for the ASRock Z77_Extreme9, rating the audio given by the onboard ALC892 CODEC as "Good". Considering the ASRock Z77 Extreme9 uses a high-end ALC898 CODEC, I actually expected better results, but really truth be told, the results aren't that bad at all. The audio was great to my ears, until pushed to higher volume levels.