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 ASUS P8Z77-V to be a bit underperforming, but perhaps our Corsair F60 drive is noticing some degredation. At the same time, it is faster than the Gigabyte G.1Sniper M3, which I completed testing on several weeks ago.

HDTune Pro (SATA 6Gb/s)

SATA 6 Gb/s showed a slightly different picture, with the ASUS P8Z77-V beating out four 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 different picture, with the ASUS P8Z77-V sitting at lower end of the graph, but sitting in the middle of actual performance.

RightMark Audio Analyzer

Audio testing using RightMark Audio Analyzer provided pretty good numbers for the ASUS P8Z77-V, rating the audio given by the onboard ALC892 CODEC as "Very Good". This is actually a spectacular result, as overall I have found the Realtek ALC892 CODEC to be rather underwhelming. This can only be attributed to excellent audio circuit design on ASUS's part, which took this relatively average CODEC, and made it perform like a high-end one!