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, I found the ECS Golden Board Z77H2-AX to be quite a bit slower than expected. I'm not sure what the story is there, as I repeated the tests several times. It might be simply explained due to the added PCIe bridge chip.

HDTune Pro (SATA 6Gb/s)

SATA 6 Gb/s showed the ECS Golden Board Z77H2-AX to perform well, but again, it is just behind the Z77X-UD5H.

HDTune Pro (USB3.0)

USB 3.0 drive performance put the ECS Golden Board Z77H2-AX second place, something I was expecting by now.

RightMark Audio Analyzer

The RMAA results given by the ECS Golden Board Z77H2-AX are rated by RMAA as "GOOD". It's actually very similar to other ECS boards, and what is expected of all onboard solutions; decent results, but a bit of noise, which is nearly unavoidable with onboard solutions.