ASUS ROG STRIX Z270F Gaming Motherboard Review

Luke Hill January 18, 2017 Featured Tech Reviews, Motherboard, Reviews

ATTO Disk Benchmark

The ATTO disk benchmark is a Windows-based utility for testing storage performance of any storage drive or controller. We use the default benchmark setup.

M.2 PCIe Performance

For M.2 testing we use a Toshiba OCZ RD400 256GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD.

M.2 transfer rates are strong and should not bottleneck a PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD such as our Toshiba OCZ RD400. ASUS does not give any provision for M.2 SSD cooling and this will cause issues during heavy sustained write operations on SSDs susceptible to thermal throttling, such as Samsung's 950 Pro.

USB 3.1 Performance

We test USB 3.1 performance using a pair of Corsair Force LE 120GB SSDs in RAID 0 connected to an Icy Box RD2253-U31 2-bay USB 3.1 enclosure powered by an ASMedia ASM1352R controller.

10Gbps USB 3.1 Gen 2 performance is strong. The ASUS board pushed past 1GBps read and write using our RAID 0 SSD test solution.

SATA 6Gbps Performance

For SATA 6Gbps testing we use a SK Hynix SE3010 960GB SSD.

SATA performance from the Z270-powered ports is without issue.

Audio

Rightmark Audio Analyser is a freeware benchmarking utility designed to objectively test the performance characteristics of audio solutions. We setup a line-in line-out loop and execute the record/playback test before generating the results report you see below. A sampling mode of 24-bit, 192 kHz was tested.