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 comparisons, nearly every platform on the market is very close to one another, as most do provide external drive-controllers which make the numbers offered very 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 in audio performance.

We 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 the Corsair ForceGT (60% full) to simulate performance in real-world situations, and I also use the same drive to test all interfaces.

HDTune Pro (SATA2)

In HDTune Pro SATA 3 GB/s performance, the ASRock Z77 OC Formula did really well, posting results right in the middle.

HDTune Pro (SATA 6Gb/s)

SATA 6 Gb/s showed the ASRock Z77 OC Formula to be right in the middle, again.

HDTune Pro (USB3.0)

USB 3.0 drive performance tests are done using the same Corsair Force GT drive used to test SATA 3 Gb/s and SATA 6 Gb/s performance, and here I got the lowest results ever. I still have the ASUS board set up for memory testing, so I checked to see if the numbers were the same for that product and they were, proving that the SSD itself wasn't the cause of such low results. Afterwards, I re-plugged the USB 3.0 dock with ASRock's Xfast RAM enabled, and numbers improved by about 50 MB/s. The ASUS board features similar boost software that shows similar numbers, but the other three tested boards here do not, giving both the ASRock and ASUS boards significant USB 3.0 performance advantages to the tune of 25%.

RightMark Audio Analyzer

Audio testing with RightMark Audio Analyzer provided pretty good numbers for the ASRock Z77 OC Formula, rating the audio given by the onboard Realtek CODEC as "Good", and it WAS good. :p